scripts/automan

Automan

Initially, this project was meant as an wrapper around man that offered automatic text reflow. The idea behind it was to recompile the source document on receiving a SIGWINCH. While that is indeed possible, and the current script currently works, still there is no simple to way to merely restore the previous position on the document.

We can get kind close to this by abusing a behaviour of less: it stores the last position of the last closed document in .lesshst. I abuse this to restore the previous position of in the manual page, but this won't work if we are dealing with multiple documents. Further, this is not even an perfect solution, as the terminal width changes, so does the last position the reader was in. To workaround this issue, we would need to know how less does its position calcualtion. A cursory look at the source code does not have any obvious solution.

I could attempt to hack around this using tmux. The idea would be to send key presses to mark the pages in less (this would also require that the --save-marks option to be set). Then the script should restart the current less instance and then send some more key presses to restore the previous page.

This approach has some issues. First, it doesn't scale. The user would be limited to 50 pages that with text reflow (less only allow marks on the ranges [a-zA-z]). Second, and most damming, since we can't know on which of the pages the user stopped (less offers to mechanism to work around this) when the reflows occurs, we can't neither properly restore to the user to where she was, nor correcly know when to stop applying the marks.

The only way around this issues is directly hacking on less to make it more scriptable, as it stands, is probably better to use an alternate strategy to have man pages that automatically reflow and offer other quality of life feautures.