Better bash man pages

We, developers, live much of our time within a shell.
Modern CLIs output
stunning help in a way before was not possible. Think of NPM or Heroku or the great
GIT.

However we still have the man pages with their
default style: black&white with some underline or bold.

So, we can change this luckily. It’s a feature, probably an ancient one, most of us
don’t know or just forgot about it.

change it

How to do that:

• create a file called .LESS_TERMCAP: touch ~/.LESS_TERMCAP

• edit the ~/.LESS_TERMCAP file with an editor: nano ~/.LESS_TERMCAP

• fill ~/.LESS_TERMCAP with this:

  # Less Colors for Man Pages
  export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[0;103m' # begin blinking
  export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[0;93m' # begin bold
  export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' # end mode
  export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' # end standout-mode
  export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$(tput bold; tput setaf 8; tput setab 3) # begin standout-mode - info box
  export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' # end underline
  export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;32m' # begin underline
  export LESS_TERMCAP_mr=$(tput rev)
  export LESS_TERMCAP_mh=$(tput dim)
  export LESS_TERMCAP_ZN=$(tput ssubm)
  export LESS_TERMCAP_ZV=$(tput rsubm)
  export LESS_TERMCAP_ZO=$(tput ssupm)
  export LESS_TERMCAP_ZW=$(tput rsupm)

• open your ~/.bash_profile with an editor: nano ~/.bash_profile

• add to ~/.bash_profile this:

  [[ -f ~/.LESS_TERMCAP ]] && . ~/.LESS_TERMCAP

• reload the ~/.bash_profile (or restart the bash session): source ~/.bash_profile

done

Now you have colorized the man pages. It’s possible also to customize the colors,
if you google a bit you’ll find the table of colors and the meaning of those variables.

Enjoy.