TkMan - a manual page and Texinfo browser

TkMan is a graphical, hypertext manual page and Texinfo browser for UNIX. TkMan boasts hypertext links, unmatched online text formatting and display quality, (optional) outline view of man pages [screen dump], high quality display and superior navigational interface to Texinfo documents [screen dump], a novel information visualization mechanism called Notemarks, full text search among man pages and Texinfo, incremental and regular expression search within pages, regular expression search within Texinfo that shows all matches (not just the next), robustly attached yellow highlight annotations, a shortcut/hot list, lists of all pages in user configurable volumes, a comprehensive Preferences panel, and man page versioning support, among many other features.

"I encourage you to use TkMan for reading man pages. ... TkMan provides an extremely pleasant GUI for browsing man pages. I cannot describe all the nice features of TkMan in this small space. Instead I will merely say that I now actually look forward to reading man pages as long as I can do it with TkMan."
-- Don Libes, Exploring Expect, page 21

Read the Linux Gazette review.

Check out the Multivalent Browser with its manual page display module, and its TkMan comparison.

Documentation

• manual
• Tcl/Tk Workshop '95 paper, which uses TkMan as a concrete example in the context of giving tips for writing faster and more robust Tcl/Tk programs
• Master's degree report (UCB Technical Report CSD-94-802)
• "TkMan: A Man Born Again", X Resource, issue 10, pages 33-46

What's New

TkMan is mature — battle tested in public distribution since 1993. However, it does track new releases of Tcl/Tk, in which it is written, as received fixes as I'm made aware of bugs.

• 2003 April 1 - TkMan's tenth birthday! TkMan 2.2 final for Tcl/Tk 8.4 released. (TkMan 2.1 for Tcl/Tk 8.3 still available.)
• 2002 October 9 - WARNING: The maintainers of groff made a change in groff version 1.18 that is incompatible with TkMan. You can fix it either by adding -P-c to the options sent to groff in the Makefile, or preferably by updating to PolyglotMan 3.1.
• 2001 September 20 - WARNING: Some versions of groff have a bug that prevents page formatting with the "long lines" option (with /tmp/ll in the formatting string). If you see a "Error: bad text index" message, update groff to a current version, which has fixed this.
• June 22 - TkMan 2.1 final is released. It is at long last Open Source, under the Artistic License. Version 2.1 final is robust to a bug introduced by Glimpse's new maintainers, which generates reports error which asking for the version number.
• May 29 - volume names for Solaris 8 added, supplied by Jongki Suwandi of Sun.
• 2000 Feburary 10 - Scriptics adopts elided text patch into core Tk, so TkMan now works with out-of-the-box Tcl/Tk 8.3 and later.

Downloading

• TkMan 2.2 for Tcl/Tk 8.4, which requires PolyglotMan v3.1. Also still available TkMan 2.1 for Tcl/Tk 8.3.
• PolyglotMan, which converts manual pages to many other formats, including HTML.
• Tcl/Tk, the scripting language and widget set in which TkMan is written. Most Linux distributions come packaged with Tcl/Tk; now that TkMan is Open Source, perhaps Linux distributions will start to ship with it as well.

• Glimpse for full-text search
• gzip/compress/bzip2/pcat - TkMan can handle manual pages and Texinfo files compressed with compress and gzip. There is experimental bzip2 support as well.

E-mail: phelps (at) ACM.org. If you're submitting a bug report, refer to the help page for information required for a response. (I do not read e-mail sent my sourceforge.net address.)