man-get

CLI tool to grab Debian manpages. I put this together out of frustration of either having to browse the web or install tools inside Docker to see manpages when working on a non-Linux system.

Usage

man-get behaves similarly to man. When a section is unspecified, it will download all available sections for the given pages. You can open these sections with man after appending the data path to the MANPATH environment variable. Since it supports the XDG Base Directory spec, you can override this path by setting XDG_DATA_HOME.

man-get caches fetched indexes from the Debian package mirror to be friendly to their servers. The cache path can also be overridden by setting XDG_CACHE_HOME.

$ man-get tar
Downloaded TAR(1) to ~/.local/share/man-get/man1/tar.1.gz
Downloaded TAR(5) to ~/.local/share/man-get/man5/tar.5.gz
Append ~/.local/share/man-get to your MANPATH to open the downloaded manpages:

        Bash/Zsh:
        $ export MANPATH="$MANPATH:/Users/connor.edwards/.local/share/man-get"

        Fish:
        $ set -x MANPATH "$MANPATH:/Users/connor.edwards/.local/share/man-get"
$ man-get 1 ed
Downloaded ED(1) to ~/.local/share/man-get/man1/ed.1.gz
Append ~/.local/share/man-get to your MANPATH to open the downloaded manpages:

        Bash/Zsh:
        $ export MANPATH="$MANPATH:/Users/connor.edwards/.local/share/man-get"

        Fish:
        $ set -x MANPATH "$MANPATH:/Users/connor.edwards/.local/share/man-get"
$ export MANPATH="$MANPATH:/Users/connor.edwards/.local/share/man-get"
$ man tar
$ man ed