Manora

Table of contents

• Description
• Installation
• Usage
• Documentation
• Contributing
• License

Description

A simple CLI & TUI tool to display, download and save man pages as PDF files.

Run the manora command to open a TUI menu (made with Ratatui) that allows searching through local man pages, downloading man pages from https://manned.org, and displaying them as PDF files.

Alternatively, specify the man page to open as an argument (e.g. manora ls). If the specified man page cannot be found locally, Manora offers to download it from https://manned.org.

Manora opens man pages in the default PDF reader defined in XDG MIME Applications, or fallback to Zathura if no default PDF reader is set.

Manora also have a CLI including multiple options and can be opened from a keybinding.

See the "Usage" chapter and the demo video below for more details:

manora.mp4

Installation

Runtime dependencies

• Required:

  • man (man-db or mandoc)
  • groff
  • xdg-utils

• Optional:

  • zathura - Used as the fallback PDF reader if no default PDF reader is set.
  • zathura-pdf-poppler or zathura-pdf-mupdf - PDF support for zathura.

Packages

Pre-compiled binary

A (statically linked) pre-compiled binary for the x86_64 (amd64) architecture is distributed as a release asset (manora-<release_version>-x86_64).

The pre-compiled binary can be reproduced from source (in the sense of reproducible builds).
The build environment is created and fully documented via repro-env, and is tracked in this repository.

To reproduce the pre-compiled binary for a given release, install repro-env and run the following:

git clone https://github.com/Antiz96/manora.git
cd manora
git checkout <tag> # Where <tag> is the git tag for the targeted release, e.g. "v2.0.0"
repro-env build -- cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
sha256sum target/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/release/manora

Then, compare the sha256 hash of the built binary to the one of the pre-compiled release binary (which is also recorded in the manora-<release_version>-x86_64.sha256 file in the release assets). Both hashes should be equal, indicating that the binary has been successfully reproduced.

Each release assets are also cryptographically signed, with the detached signature for each asset distributed as <asset_name>.asc (see the MAINTAINERS.md file for a list of keys expected to emit signatures).

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/Antiz96/manora.git
cd manora
cargo build --release

The built binary will be located at ./target/release/manora.

The man page can be generated with scdoc:

scdoc < doc/man/manora.1.scd > doc/man/manora.1

There are also shell completions available in the res/completions/ directory.

Usage

Run the manora command to open a TUI menu that allows searching through local man pages, downloading man pages from https://manned.org, and displaying them as PDF files.
Alternatively, specify the man page to open as an argument (e.g. manora ls).

Manora opens man pages in the default PDF reader defined in XDG MIME Applications, or fallback to Zathura if no default PDF reader is set.

To save / export a man page to a local PDF file, run manora --save <man page> where <man page> is the man page to save (e.g. manora --save ls). The file will be saved as man_<man page>.pdf (e.g. man_ls.pdf) in the current directory. Alternatively, specify the file to save the man page to: manora --save <man page> <file> (e.g. manora --save ls ~/Documents/man_pages/ls.pdf).
If the destination file already exists, Manora asks for a confirmation to overwrite it.

If the selected man page cannot be found locally, Manora offers to download it from https://manned.org (whether it is to open or save it).
Alternatively, use the -d / --download option to skip searching for the man page locally and directly download it from https://manned.org instead (e.g. manora --download ls, manora --download --save ls).

Manora can also be opened from a keybinding. For instance, one can bind the alacritty -e manora command to a keybinding, which will open the manora TUI menu in alacritty (allowing to select the man page to open in the PDF reader).

See manora --help, the manora(1) man page and the demo video for more details.

Documentation

See manora --help and the manora(1) man page.

Contributing

See the contributing guidelines.

License

Manora is licensed under the GPL-3.0 license (or any later version of that license).