1

I am running man man in both a skinny and a fat terminal window. I don't care if stuff is right-justified, as long as the behavior I describe below is accomplished. I did try man --nj man, and it didn't work.

Skinny terminal window

What I see

man is the system's manual pager. Each page argument given to man is normally the name of a program,
util-
ity or function. The manual page associated with each of these arguments is then found and displayed.
A
section, if provided, will direct man to look only in that section of the manual. The default action is
to
search in all of the available sections following a pre-defined order (see DEFAULTS), and to show only
the
first page found, even if page exists in several sections.

What I want to see

man is the system's manual pager. Each page argument given to man is normally the name of a program,
utility or function. The manual page associated with each of these arguments is then found and 
displayed. A section, if provided, will direct man to look only in that section of the manual. The
default action is to search in all of the available sections following a pre-defined order (see DEFAULTS),
and to show only the first page found, even if page exists in several sections.

Fat terminal window

What I see

man is the system's manual pager. Each page argument given to man is normally the name of a program, util-
ity or function. The manual page associated with each of these arguments is then found and displayed. A
section, if provided, will direct man to look only in that section of the manual. The default action is to
search in all of the available sections following a pre-defined order (see DEFAULTS), and to show only the
first page found, even if page exists in several sections.

What I want to see

One long line, broken at the end of the terminal window.

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2
  • What does skinny and fat mean? Is it small and large widths? I don't get what you mean with "One long line, broken at the end of the terminal window."
    – Quasímodo
    Dec 6, 2020 at 21:07
  • By skinny, I mean a small width. By fat, I mean a large width. By one long line... I mean the following: when I make the terminal fullscreen, the man page has line breaks well before the end of the screen. I would like them to continue until the end of the terminal.
    – Not me
    Dec 7, 2020 at 0:18

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

It looks like your COLUMNS variable is set or intended to a greater number of chars in some passage between the execution of man --no-justify and the rendering, run

echo COLUMNS=$COLUMNS
COLUMNS=`tput cols` man --nj --no-hyphenation man

To remove any doubt count your effective columns using (not the first 2-3 digits of each group represent the number of characters reached, then is easy to see at what characters it reach the rightmost character in the terminal)

echo 123456789 223456789 323456789 423456789 523456789 623456789 723456789 823456789 823456789 923456789 103456789 113456789 123456789 133456789 143456789 153456789 163456789 173456789 183456789 193456789 203456789 213456789 223456789 233456789 243456789 253456789 263456789 273456789 283456789 293456789 303456789 313456789 323456789 333456789 343456789 353456789 363456789 373456789 383456789 393456789
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