Bwana
Bwana 2.7
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(5) 4.9

Manual page viewer for Web browsers.   Free
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Bwana is a manual page viewer for your Browser. It parses man pages in real time to provide the most up to date pages in an easy to read format. The pages have links to other man pages, http and email references--the way man pages should have been from the start.
What's New
Version 2.7:
  • Updated Firefox script to work with the Firefox 3.5 (Jeffrey Berman)
Requirements
Intel/PPC, Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later



MacUpdate - Bwana




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Bwana User Discussion (Write a Review)
ver. 2.x:
(5)
Your rating: Now say why...
Overall:
(12)

sort: smiles | time
burypromote
+1

+17

Jichi reviewed on 12 Feb 2010
Hope the developer can add applescript support, so that I can write a command line script to open manpage in the terminal like "bwana something".

Anyway, Bwana is the one of my indispensible apps to easily convert manpage to webpage. Thanks to the author.
[Version 2.7]


burypromote
+2

+369

Drdul reviewed on 07 Mar 2008
Excellent app! The best way I've found to view man pages. I'm slowly learning UNIX, and having Bwana available to quickly pop up a man page is great. Even better is that Bwana provides hyperlinks to other man pages ('cuz I often start out with the wrong command and need to find the correct one).
[Version 2.4]


burypromote
+2

+25
Bruji (developer) commented on 31 Dec 2006
To add man paths to your system include them in man configuration file located in /usr/share/misc/man.conf. The format for including another path is a new line with: MANPATH /usr/share/mynewpath. To open a temporary page in a path you don't want to include as part of your man configuration then pass the entire path to Bwana with man:/Users/myuser/Desktop/mansource.1 or man:///Users/myuser/Desktop/mansource.1
[Version 2.1]


burypromote

+12
Greg Raven commented on 13 Dec 2006
The new version is even better than the previous, and as you can see below, I really liked the previous version. The two main improvements as far as I'm concerned are the addition af a search box on each results page, and the link to the "index" page. Fabulous stuff!
[Version 2.0]


burypromote

+12

Greg Raven reviewed on 01 Aug 2006
I've seen several other ways of reading man pages that don't involve going to Terminal.app, but Bwana is far and away the best method. I virtually always have Safari open, so man pages are seldom more than a click away. Bwana formats the man pages very nicely, and adds links to other man pages. As nice as Bwana is, it's a shame that most man pages are so poorly written. Bwana deserves better!
[Version 1.9]


burypromote

-1
Kballard commented on 12 Nov 2004
I think Bwana is really neat, but I think it would be even better if it was done as an internet plugin. That way it would work in all browsers that support internet plugins, it would work transparently in browsers (i.e. no more URL bar going blank, then sitting and waiting and it magically changing to a temporary HTML file).
[Version 1.4]


burypromote


Anonymous reviewed on 12 Nov 2004
In some locations it seems Bwana only looks into man1 category when it comes to indexing.

It's sort of an easter egg thing but what about "man:Bwana"?
[Version 1.3]

2 Replies

burypromote

Anonymous commented on 12 Nov 2004
It looks into all the directories. If a directory is empty it won't list it. So probably at those locations man2, man3..etc are empty directories or don't exist at all. if you do have source files in there let me know I will give it a closer look. Don't have a "man:bwana" I guess I should put one in, but the application is so light and simple at 100k, it hasn't achieved easter egg status yet. :)
burypromote

Akadis2 commented on 23 Jan 2005
man://whatever seems to work (of course replacing whatever with what you are looking up.) and if you us it with Sogudi you can use it like you would in the terminal:
man whatever
burypromote


Anonymous reviewed on 11 Nov 2004
I like it a lot! It was so easy to set up. Drag it to your hard drive (mine's in /Applications/Utilities like they suggested) and you're done!

A couple of things I'd like to see:

- (IMO) the URL should still say 'man:diff' instead of the PATH to the man file (although this could be configurable and/or the PATH could display at the top of the man'd page.
- the URL in the readme file has a ';' instead of a ':' (http;//www.bruji.com/)
- the bruji.com has no entry for Bwana--just their bread & butter products (I like the name now that I understand it!)
[Version 1.2]

1 Reply

burypromote

Anonymous commented on 12 Nov 2004
If anybody knows how to tell Safari to load a file but keep the URL different, please let me know. So I can leave the URL "man:diff". If you know how to do it in Javascript that will work as well. Frames are not an elegant solution, so I don't want that.
burypromote


Anonymous reviewed on 11 Nov 2004
Good stuff. I love the intensive development schedule, too! ;)
[Version 1.2]


burypromote

fxn commented on 11 Nov 2004
Great utility! Man pages look really nice, Safari is always opened in my desktop so Bwana is available right there at the tip of your fingers, and links to mentioned man pages are very useful.

As a side note, I call it via Sogudi, this way I can type a space instead of a colon (I prefer it and in addition it is consistent with the rest of shortcuts), and can easily have a perldoc alias for man, which looks more familiar to me for Perl documentation.
[Version 1.2]


burypromote
-1

-1
8bit-Wintermute had trouble on 17 Dec 2006
This is a great program but it seems not to be using MANPATH because I can't make it find any of the Darwinports / fink installed manual pages.

This really limits the usefulness for me
[Version 2.1]


burypromote

+1
Vinceleers had trouble on 31 Jul 2006
please add support for omniweb!
otherwise it's great - thanks..
[Version 1.9]

1 Reply

burypromote

+25
Bruji (developer) replied on 10 Oct 2006
If you want to use Bwana with OmniWeb, add the following lines to the scripts.strings file. (You can access the file by ctlr-clicking the Bwana icon and then navigate to Show package contents/Contents/Resources/scripts.strings) These are the lines you need to include in the script:

OmniWeb
tell application "OmniWeb"
GetURL "file://%@"
end tell

(Code comes courtesty of Bwana user Tim M.)

After that save the file and you'll be good to go.


vSeven rated on 25 Feb 2012

[Version 2.7]




Wojtek Surowka rated on 02 Jul 2011

[Version 2.7]



+7

Dana Nau rated on 01 Jun 2011

[Version 2.7]


Downloads:20,996
Version Downloads:8,040
Type:Utilities : System
License:Free
Date:29 Sep 2009
Platform:PPC 32 / Intel 32 / OS X
Price:Free0.00
Overall (Version 2.x):
Features:
Ease of Use:
Value:
Stability:
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Bwana is a manual page viewer for your Browser. It parses man pages in real time to provide the most up to date pages in an easy to read format. The pages have links to other man pages, http and email references--the way man pages should have been from the start.


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