Noman (pronounced no-man) is a small package that tries to parse the help output from command line programs into an easy-to-navigate Emacs user interface.
I primarily wrote this package to navigate the command line help from kubectl and aws, both of which have nested sub-commands, and quite verbose (and helpful!) command line help.
Neither of these programs ships with man pages, or similar offline documentation. I find myself consulting the command line help often, but struggling to find the experience very ergonomic.
This package aims to make the experience of browsing command line help more pleasant.
Noman is on MELPA so you can install it directly with:
M-x package-refresh-contents RET M-x package-install RET noman RET
If you use use-package, you could also install Noman with:
(use-package noman :ensure t)The entrypoint for this package is the noman command:
M-x noman RET
When prompted for a command, enter a program in your PATH, e.g. kubectl.
Noman then tries to run the command with the --help or help suffixes, and parse the output. Parsing the output simply involves looking for subcommands, and turning them into links for subsequent invocations of noman.
The default key-bindings are as follows:
| Key | Description |
|---|---|
n | Next line |
p | Previous line |
q | Quit the window |
g or m | Select a subcommand to display |
G | Run noman for a different command |
l | Back to the previous subcommand |
TAB | Forward button |
<backtab> | Backward button |
Noman also supports displaying help for shell built-in commands using a prefix argument:
C-u M-x noman RET
By default, Noman will use your system shell for this. If you want to use a different shell, you can customise the noman-shell-file-name variable:
(setq noman-shell-file-name "/bin/bash")Custom parsing functions can be added to noman-parsing-functions to add support for programs whose help does not work with Noman out-of-the-box. For an example of how this works, you can read how the AWS CLI is supported:
(add-to-list 'noman-parsing-functions '("aws" . noman--make-aws-button))By default, Noman will open all help pages in the same buffer called *noman*. If you would prefer different buffers for each help page, you can set the noman-reuse-buffers variable:
(setq noman-reuse-buffers nil)kubectlterraformghawsnpm
Contributions are very welcome! Please feel free to fork this repo and raise a PR. If you make a significant change that isn’t already covered by the existing tests, please also consider adding new test cases.
Tests are written using ert, and can either be run directing using M-x ert RET, or from a shell with make test.