Or is there maybe a way to set the pager for all help related queries to some command? I’m using bat and would like to pipe all --help through | bat --language=help by default for the syntax highlighting and colored output… Or if you know a lower effort way to color the output of --help let me know.
You’d be intercepting all commands just to verify if they have a help flag and then if not executing them as they were intended. If the intercept got broke, then the shell would be completely broken.
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Not everything uses groff. A lot will have their own function or another.
Edit: I think for what you indicting you are wanting to try you’d need to either patch your shell of choice or write your own.
Edit2: If you did patch it, the best way I can think of to get something upstreamed would be to patch bash to use CTRL-Enter to automatically pipe the output to the default pager defined in BASHPAGER followed by PAGER if it doesn’t exist. Then set the BASHPAGER to your “bat” command.
Frankly, I would be surprised, if anything uses groff for displaying
--help, unless it shows the man page for that.The most basic implementation of
--helpis a manually formatted multi-line string written into the source code, which gets printed as-is.For dynamic layouting, you do need more logic, but rendering it to groff source code first does not make that easier. For tabbing, you print an appropriate number of
\t.I agree, I just didn’t want to make assumptions about how newer things work with localization these days.
At this point, someone has to have already made a prettier shell or terminal that is configured like this by default. Hideous 1950s monocolor --help output can’t be a novel issue in 2025.
16 Color terminals didn’t really start getting used until the 90s and early 2000s. And 256 after that. A lot of software was written back then and it would take a lot to add something that might not display well because of the terminal’s color scheme and now we have color theming.
I wonder if Busybox or similar rewrites contain standardization that could be leveraged.
I am getting the feeling the you are mis-understanding than each project has their own independent implementing function and that each one would need to be rewritten. There a 10 of thousands of projects. This is not some simple, change 1 project task.
Why are you confrontational? I’m just casually tossing out ideas and learning. Of course I understand what you are saying. However, busybox covers the core of a POSIX system and with the size constraints, it is likely standardising something like this. On Gentoo, such a change might be more straight forward instead of some sloppy hack with a wrapper.
I imagine you must be good at memorizing a lot of information. I am not. I am good at abstraction and must explore in abstraction to understand heuristically. I understand heuristic connections better than most people. Neither method is better or worse. Being toxic about interchanges of information is useless nonsense. I know far more than I let on, but I’m well aware that I am a jack of all trades and expert of none. All the projects don’t matter relative to those that are used the most. If most projects can be colorized, it will motivate others to fall in line or prompt rewrites assuming such a change was popular. Colorized manpages and help pages should be standard and should have been a decade ago. No one is using an IDE without syntax highlighting. The terminal is an extension of the abstracted language of Linux. Without universal syntax highlighting for new users in these spaces, Linux is presenting an outdated language format ripe for deprecation. These details have long term consequences.
I wasn’t intending to come off confrontational, I apologize for that. I was looking at this from it sounding like you wanted any command on a system. I did find that you can colorize man. see script below for an example. As for busybox, it is a small project, so colorizing just it would be relatively easy and easy to add as a patch to a system. Not sure if that would upstream though as it is intended to work well on low memory systems among others.
#!/bin/bash export PAGER="less -r" export GROFF_NO_SGR=1 export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m' export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m' export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m' man lsEdit: it does seem that this man colorization is disabled by default.
Edit2: “export MANROFFOPT=-c” can replace “export GROFF_NO_SGR=1” to limit just man.
Edit3: source Arch Linux bbs