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
      31·
      5 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·
        5 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·
        5 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.