Shell Terminal based FreeBSD Handbook Viewer

delta0

delta0

Hey, quick note. If this isn’t the right place for it, feel free to delete or move it.

I couldn’t find an easy way to read the FreeBSD Handbook through the terminal without installing something like w3m or lynx, so I made my own solution. It works as long as you have the FreeBSD documentation installed (use $ bsdconfig and select Documentation). It’s under the BSD license too.

Honestly, I think it’s pretty ugly, and the navigation is super basic. For example, to get to the Wayland instructions, you’d have to type something like 2 2 7 46 1, pressing Enter after each number.

The only upsides are that it’s region/language agnostic, updates automatically when you update your handbook package, and is only 1.6 KB.

You can grab the handbook.sh file, ignore everything else, make it executable with chmod, and run it. I haven’t coded in years, so feel free to share any feedback or critiques!

https://github.com/dudleyi/handbook

- D

PS,
Does something like this already exist? Also, screenshots:

Screenshot_20241221_141043.png
Screenshot_20241221_135930.png
 
delta0 said:
Hey, quick note. If this isn’t the right place for it, feel free to delete or move it.

I couldn’t find an easy way to read the FreeBSD Handbook through the terminal without installing something like w3m or lynx, so I made my own solution. It works as long as you have the FreeBSD documentation installed (use $ bsdconfig and select Documentation). It’s under the BSD license too.

Honestly, I think it’s pretty ugly, and the navigation is super basic. For example, to get to the Wayland instructions, you’d have to type something like 2 2 7 46 1, pressing Enter after each number.

The only upsides are that it’s region/language agnostic, updates automatically when you update your handbook package, and is only 1.6 KB.

You can grab the handbook.sh file, ignore everything else, make it executable with chmod, and run it. I haven’t coded in years, so feel free to share any feedback or critiques!

https://github.com/dudleyi/handbook

- D

PS,
Does something like this already exist? Also, screenshots:

View attachment 21323View attachment 21322
Click to expand...

I use www/w3m-img to read the handbook:
Code: 
beastie@BattleStar-Lat54 --> ~
Ψ w3m /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/en/books/handbook/index.html

1735042603628.png
 
delta0 said:
I'm glad you found something that works for you. How do you get past the really long menus at the beginning of most of the pages? Do you scroll? My solution omits them.
Click to expand...
I just scroll. But honestly I don't use it that much, only in tty.
What I actually use is the official pdf version:
Code: 
beastie@BattleStar-Lat54 --> ~/Documents/Library/Tech/FreeBSD
Ψ ll Official                                                                                                                                                                  < 15:56 >  < 11,724-12-25 >  < 0 > 
l0755 beastie beastie 31 B 11,724-11-04  Official@ ⇒ /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/en
beastie@BattleStar-Lat54 --> ~/Documents/Library/Tech/FreeBSD
Ψ
 
If the handbook format could be converted to markdown that would make things more easy to manage, there are markdown file readers out there like "mdcat" or "gloss". Then you don't have to write something complicated to handle the rest.

For example VoidLinux drop their handbook as md files, in the past I had a function or a script (I don't remember exactly) that let me search for a pattern through their handbook and then open it in terminal, that was super simple to do.

Now on FreeBSD that's different, the handbook is way bigger and it is offered in PDF format, so I open it with "zathura" (super fast and handy), press the key "/" to make my research, and that's it. This is the simpler way to deal with it in my opinion.
 
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