Hi astian, > Date: 2026-09-17 19:09:41+0000 > From: astian > [...] > > I don't know how you read .md or .rst, but I read them in the terminal, > > usually with less(1), which doesn't reflow them. > > But you read the rendered manpage, the output of running groff (and co.) > on the manpage source, right? If you were to read manpage sources with > less in the terminal there wouldn't be reflowing either, naturally. > > The point I was making is that newlines in groff_man pages did not seem > to be more semantic than those in adoc/md/rst/whatever. Upon rendering, > paragraph lines are reflowed. After Robinson's explanation I can see 1 > bit of meaning to them (sentence delimiters). Yeah, if we used it exclusively as source for formatted manual pages --just like man(7) is used now--, then I'd be fine reading the formatted pages. However, as you said in another email, that would delete the unique advantage of .md/.rst, and the source would read as bad as man(7) source (IMO, worse, because the formatting macros would be replaced by weird pubctuation, which is more difficult to control --as we've seen in a recent mail too--). I believe kernel maintainers would run away fro .rst if they used semantic newlines and thus had to format them to read them nicely. > > Is there any program for reading these in the terminal reflowed? > > I guess there are although I don't personally use one (of course, that's > the point of these "light markup" formats: they mostly look like plain > text so you don't much need a renderer). For example, there are plenty > of tools to convert these formats to HTML which can then be viewed in a > terminal browser. Or one could use pandoc to convert them to *roff > and... haha ;). Yeah, it ain't going to work. Luckily, we've got man(7). :-) Have a lovely night! Alex --