I use zsh and have export MANPAGER="nvim -Rc 'set ft=man' -" in my .zshrc. this used to work well but since a couple of weeks ago, whenever I run man (e.g. man man) I get many weird escape characters (e.g. MAN(1)). when running man and manually piping the output to another program (e.g. man man | nvim -Rc 'set ft=man' -) I don’t get these characters (e.g. MAN(1)). I haven’t been able to figure out why this happens or how to fix it. does anyone else have an idea?

edit: turns out :h man had a solution, using export MANPAGER='nvim +Man!'' instead of export MANPAGER="nvim -Rc 'set ft=man' -".

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    I added this to my .zshrc after getting weird formatting in manpages. I do use bat as a my pager though so not too sure if it will help.

    export MANROFFOPT='-c'

    • @lemmonadeOP
      3•1 year ago

      thanks! this didn’t solved my specific problem but caused another problem for me (e.g. _M_A_N(1)), but while searching about MANROFFOPT I came across a reddit post I had somehow missed when searching for a solution, and it it the actual solution was mentioned. what worked for me is export MANPAGER='nvim +Man!' instead.