Current behaviour
Example: x-man-page://8/fsck_cs is misinterpreted as an http://
URL.
Proposal
Allow x-man-page://
URLs to be hyperlinked —
Motivations
Appropriateness. Referring to an http://
or https://
URL for an online copy of the page may present a manual that is too new or too old for the user's system. Linking to an x-man-page://
URL will ensure that the page, read in OS X, is proper for the system.
Ease of use. The settings used by Terminal in response to these URLs are more immediately user-friendly than, say, entering man grep
at the command line. Windows such as those below respond normally to the close box, to Command-W, down, up, page down and up keys, scrolling and so on:
Assumptions
It will be possible to enable this feature discretely, in apple.stackexchange.com areas alone
- other stacks might be less welcoming of link protocols that are operating system-specific.
The reader will use OS X when following a link that is intended to open Terminal.app
- for this reason, I chose Ask Different for this meta question.
Questions of a type that might include x-man-page://
URLs are not likely to be migrated to any stack other than Ask Different.
Risks
Without OS X, a reader may be confused by links that their system can not handle. Minimise this risk by use of plain english. With the shortening workaround suggested by Kyle, any one of the following examples might be plain enough:
- view the manual page for mddiagnose in OS X
- view the manual page for mddiagnose in Terminal
- view the manual page for mddiagnose in Terminal.app
- view the manual page for mddiagnose in Terminal in OS X.
Verbosity and gobbledy-gook. This exists in some man pages, not all. If a person will be daunted by the content of a page, then he or she might prefer to read that content in a web browser (solutions such as Bwana are given in answers elsewhere).
However: most such content relates to use of Terminal, so I argue that there's value in encouraging uses that can make Terminal less daunting. Reading a page that can be scrolled and closed with ease is one such use case.