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.

Image of an Example Wikipedia Page

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.

Metadata

Release files for downwards 1.3.1

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for downwards 1.3.1
File	Size	Uploaded	Provenance
downwards-1.3.1.tar.gz	6.3 kB	Aug 9, 2021	Without provenance	Details

Release files / downwards-1.3.1.tar.gz

Download URL	downwards-1.3.1.tar.gz
Size	6.3 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`b35deca0c99fb3c9503841b3e0241a9be5a6fcf0632880fff353dfbf6c12a385`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`6492f8b00acc0035d75ef4a9993bda942d4235330efc8a61d887f98d9297667d`
Upload date	Aug 9, 2021
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/3.3.0 pkginfo/1.7.0 requests/2.25.1 setuptools/57.0.0 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 tqdm/4.56.0 CPython/3.9.6`

Security for downwards 1.3.1

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