Or is there maybe a way to set the pager for all help related queries to some command? I’m using bat and would like to pipe all --help through | bat --language=help by default for the syntax highlighting and colored output… Or if you know a lower effort way to color the output of --help let me know.

  • RedWeasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    You’d be intercepting all commands just to verify if they have a help flag and then if not executing them as they were intended. If the intercept got broke, then the shell would be completely broken.

      • RedWeasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        4 hours ago

        Not everything uses groff. A lot will have their own function or another.

        Edit: I think for what you indicting you are wanting to try you’d need to either patch your shell of choice or write your own.

        Edit2: If you did patch it, the best way I can think of to get something upstreamed would be to patch bash to use CTRL-Enter to automatically pipe the output to the default pager defined in BASHPAGER followed by PAGER if it doesn’t exist. Then set the BASHPAGER to your “bat” command.

        • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          Frankly, I would be surprised, if anything uses groff for displaying --help, unless it shows the man page for that.
          The most basic implementation of --help is a manually formatted multi-line string written into the source code, which gets printed as-is.
          For dynamic layouting, you do need more logic, but rendering it to groff source code first does not make that easier. For tabbing, you print an appropriate number of \t.

        • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          At this point, someone has to have already made a prettier shell or terminal that is configured like this by default. Hideous 1950s monocolor --help output can’t be a novel issue in 2025.