I wonder why colorizing manpages like this is not default in most distros. That seems like an obvious thing to configure for end user’s quality of life.

My best guess would be that each terminal could display differently or be buggy and a “lowest common denominator” approach where it work everywhere. I know blue tends to be to dark unless I change the color to a lighter shade and the font could make a difference as well.

No

I wasn’t intending to come off confrontational, I apologize for that. I was looking at this from it sounding like you wanted any command on a system. I did find that you can colorize man. see script below for an example. As for busybox, it is a small project, so colorizing just it would be relatively easy and easy to add as a patch to a system. Not sure if that would upstream though as it is intended to work well on low memory systems among others.

#!/bin/bash

export PAGER="less -r"
export GROFF_NO_SGR=1
export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m'

man ls

Edit: it does seem that this man colorization is disabled by default.

Edit2: “export MANROFFOPT=-c” can replace “export GROFF_NO_SGR=1” to limit just man.

Edit3: source Arch Linux bbs

I am getting the feeling the you are mis-understanding than each project has their own independent implementing function and that each one would need to be rewritten. There a 10 of thousands of projects. This is not some simple, change 1 project task.

16 Color terminals didn’t really start getting used until the 90s and early 2000s. And 256 after that. A lot of software was written back then and it would take a lot to add something that might not display well because of the terminal’s color scheme and now we have color theming.

I agree, I just didn’t want to make assumptions about how newer things work with localization these days.

Honestly he idolizes Russia, so … Their economy is barely an international one right now. Also one of the worst internationally for a “major” country.

I told friends and relatives in February that we’d be in a recession by the end of the year. I expected 3 quarters for it, not his first 2. 2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction are needed by the modern definition of a recession.

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.

Or if you are lazy you could add “-h” as an option to said help command for when --help doesn’t work. Shouldn’t take to long to to make a list with a script that runs each command to with --help and logs it all to a file though. Then just go look for the ones that don’t like it in the log. Apparently bash has a builtin command named help, so a different name is probably better then.

ls -1 $dir | while read line do echo “----------” $line --help |& >> logfile.txt done

Just search in you favorite pager for “-----” and just hit “next” key.

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.

I think your best bet to to create a script called help and run “help <command>” and the script would do the rest.

A more modern variation would be “Those who can’t defend themselves”. In a way it still is because they can’t defend themselves and the bad guys can.