Manpages

[notpeelz]

Whenever I run uwsm -h, I find that it floods my terminal with a lot of information. I have to fullscreen the terminal or reduce the font size in order to see all of the text.

I think it would be a good idea to move the more verbose information to manpages to make it easier to read (and reduce the cognitive load).

A couple examples on how to set this up with meson (requires #17):

• systemd uses an XML-based manpage generator: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/414ae39821f0c103b076fc5f7432f827e0e79765/man/meson.build
• sway uses scdoc: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/blob/c5fd8c050f7ddbfe3e5b7abc8f5f6ace3a3c5307/meson.build#L124C21-L124C26

[Vladimir-csp]

What do you think about 10f589b? Now I either have to find something to template it with uwsm-bin-name, or drop the renaming thing entirely.

[notpeelz]

Nice! I looked through it briefly and left a couple comments. Overall it looks good :+1:

As for the uwsm-bin-name option: I thought you could use configure_file() for this, but it seems to strip trailing white spaces, which breaks scdoc's parser.

This is what I used:

scdoc = dependency(
  'scdoc',
  version: '>=1.9.2',
  native: true,
  required: get_option('man-pages'),
)
if scdoc.found()
  scdoc_prog = find_program(scdoc.get_variable(pkgconfig: 'scdoc'), native: true)
  mandir = get_option('mandir')
  man_files = [
    'uwsm.1.scd.in',
    'uwsm-plugins.3.scd',
  ]
  conf = configuration_data()
  conf.set('BIN_NAME', UWSM_BIN_NAME)

  foreach filename : man_files
    basename = filename.split('/')[-1]
    if basename.endswith('.in')
      basename = basename.substring(0, -3)
      scd_file = configure_file(
        input: filename,
        output: basename,
        configuration: conf,
      )
    else
      scd_file = filename
    endif

    topic = basename.split('.')[-3]
    section = basename.split('.')[-2]
    output = '@0@.@1@'.format(topic, section)

    custom_target(
      output,
      input: scd_file,
      output: output,
      command: scdoc_prog,
      install: true,
      feed: true,
      capture: true,
      install_dir: '@0@/man@1@'.format(mandir, section),
    )
  endforeach
endif

I don't think it's worth the trouble. It's probably better to remove uwsm-bin-name instead.

[Vladimir-csp]

Thanks for the feedback, closing this.