downwards 1.3.1

downwards lets you read a wikipedia page on command line as a manpage.

downwards

You want to read a wikipedia page right from your terminal, right? RIGHT?

I know because I wanted it.

downwards is downloading the article you want, converts it to mdoc and displays it using your local man binary.

$ downwards OpenBSD
$ downwards 'Theo de Raadt'
$ downwards 'Python (Programming Langauge)'
$ downwards --help
Usage: downwards [OPTIONS] ARTICLE

  downwards lets you read a wikipedia page on command line as a manpage.

Options:
  -l, --language TEXT  Language for wikipedia
  -s, --stdout         Print to stdout
  --help               Show this message and exit.

I found it very helpful to set export MANWIDTH=80 for nicely readable documents.

Installation

Installation

pip3 install downwards

Development

pip3 install --upgrade .

Background

I wanted to play around with OpenBSDs mandoc and learn how mdoc works. Then I played around with Wikipedia and put both things together.

However, once I got a first prototype up and running, I started liking it. It feels like a "reader"-feature from your browser, but only from your terminal right at hand.

Bugs and Known Issues

There are always some things in automatically generated mdoc documents that throw warnings. Since you cannot make man ignoring them, I need to press ctrl+l to reset those warnings.

man is really not made to display a wide range of special utf8 characters (neither on OpenBSD, Linux nor macOS). I've done what I can to strip those away or replace german umlauts with ae for example.