Continuing along in my series about how to make Windows more palatable for Linux users, one thing that’s been more difficult to find a workaround for is the man
command
For about an hour, I went on a wild goose chase for some sort of alternative in Windows, and found relatively little. I discovered a win32 implementation of mandoc
here, which sounds interesting, but I decided not to explore it further than seeing if it’d run (spoiler: it does), since where would I download all the man files for the utilities that were included with git-bash? Sounded like too much of a chore.
Instead, I opted to go with an entirely new shell framework, called msys2. It’s slightly different than git-bash, in that, although both link to cygwin.dll
for their tools, it starts logins an entirely new user folder in the C:\tools\msys64\home\user
directory, and uses pacman as a package manager. You can supposedly compile tools that are totally win32 compatible with minGW (also included in the installation package) without having to link to cygwin.dll
, but I’ve yet to see that in action.
Besides, all I really cared about at the time was getting my man
back! Does that sound like you? Are you also a Windows user missing your man
? Well, read further!