4.4 Changing the Current Man Page

The man page currently being browsed by WoMan can be changed in several ways. The command woman can be invoked to format another man page, or the current WoMan buffer can be buried or killed. WoMan maintains a ring of formatted man pages, and it is possible to move forwards and backwards in this ring by moving to the next or previous man page. It is sometimes useful to reformat the current page, for example after the right margin (the wrap column) or some other formatting parameter has been changed.

Buffers formatted by Man and WoMan are completely unrelated, even though some of the commands to manipulate them are superficially the same (and share code).

m

Run the command man to get a Un*x manual page and put it in a buffer. This command is the top-level command in the man package. It runs a Un*x command to retrieve and clean a man page in the background and places the results in a Man mode (man page browsing) buffer. If a man buffer already exists for this man page, it will display immediately. This works exactly the same if WoMan is loaded, except that the formatting time is displayed in the mini-buffer.

w

Run the command woman exactly as if the extended command or menu item had been used.

q

Bury the buffer containing the current man page (Man-quit), i.e., move it to the bottom of the buffer stack.

k

Kill the buffer containing the current man page (Man-kill), i.e., delete it completely so that it can be retrieved only by formatting the page again.

M-p

Find the previous WoMan buffer (WoMan-previous-manpage).

M-n

Find the next WoMan buffer (WoMan-next-manpage).

R

Call WoMan to reformat the last man page formatted by WoMan (woman-reformat-last-file), e.g., after changing the fill column.