Noman

Noman (pronounced no-man) is a small package that tries to parse the help output from command line programs into an easy-to-navigate Emacs user interface.

I primarily wrote this package to navigate the command line help from kubectl and aws, both of which have nested sub-commands, and quite verbose (and helpful!) command line help.

Neither of these programs ships with man pages, or similar offline documentation. I find myself consulting the command line help often, but struggling to find the experience very ergonomic.

This package aims to make the experience of browsing command line help more pleasant.

Installation

Noman isn’t on MELPA yet, but it can be installed directly from this repo. First, clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/andykuszyk/noman.el ~/noman.el

Then, add it to your load path:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/noman.el")
(require 'noman)

Usage

The entrypoint for this package is the noman command:

M-x noman RET

When prompted for a command, enter a program in your PATH, e.g. kubectl.

Noman then tries to run the command with the --help or help suffixes, and parse the output. Parsing the output simply involves looking for subcommands, and turning them into links for subsequent invocations of noman.

The key-bindings are as follows:

Key	Description
n	Next line
p	Previous line
q	Quit the window
g or m	Select a subcommand to display
G	Run noman for a different command
l	Back to the previous subcommand
TAB	Forward button
<backtab>	Backward button

Known to work with

• kubectl
• terraform
• gh
• aws