C++ man pages
• 375 words • 2 min • updated
Today I stumbled upon across a project called cppman1, which I believe has
a very suggestive name indeed. Manual pages for the C programming language are
almost always available on Unix systems. Don’t you remember the signature of the
qsort function? No problem, a man 3 qsort will refresh your memory. What
about printf? What about stdlib.h? Man won’t disappoint you. However,
what about C++ man pages? I first discovered that they weren’t available by
default about three years ago. Okay, so what do I do? A simple google search
will probably lead you to Stack Overflow2. At the aforementioned time, there
weren’t really useful answers in there. Okay, some of them pointed out to
libstd++ docs, but using them wasn’t much convenient. The best documentation
sources you could find were cplusplus.com and cppreference wiki3. You can
live with these on-line references, but you will quickly get bored with them.
Now, back to cppman, the boredom killer and time saver.
cppman — quick reference #
Installing it #
- If you’re an user of Arch Linux, it is available in the AUR at the time I’m writing this post.
- Otherwise, you can install it using python’s
pip– ya know,pip install cppman.
It doesn’t really matter the method you choose, just make sure to add it to your
PATH.
Using it #
cppman sort
cppman mapDon’t cry, it is real. You can optionally cache all of its man pages, but I
don’t find this strictly necessary for me. The default option (no cache)
downloads manual pages on-demand. Oh, it uses vim as its default pager, so you
can search for keywords with /. Also, hyperlinks are everywhere, so you can
use K or C-] to follow them. To go back, use C-t. By the way, it is
compatible with man, so if you decide to cache its man pages, you can view
them later with man (instead of cppman). Happy hacking reading!4