Skip to main content

Finding just the snippets in man page you care about

Project description

Updates for the AI era!

You can now intelligently mansnip into your context window by setting an environment variable like this:

$ MANSNIP_LLM=1 mansnip ...

This will do a variety of things (try it yourself) that optimize for minimal token-length when using an llm.

Compare various approaches for finding the documentation for bash's complete command:

$ man bash | token-count                            # whole page
73392
$ man bash | grep -C 3 complete | token-count       # naive approach with a bunch of garbage input
8833
$ mansnip bash complete | token-count               # mansnip without llm feature
2908
$ MANSNIP_LLM=1 mansnip bash complete | token-count # with new llm compaction!
1624

That's a 98% reduction! Sweet.

There's also a ready-to-go MCP server for it in mcp-server.py.

Just pip install mansnip

My classic 2020 pitch below!

Video

"As seen on YouTube!" (click image, it's only 1min 45sec)


Don't you hate wasting time navigating through manpages with the leading pager's clunky search tools?

Ever try to find things like the "declare" built-in in bash(1) only to slodge through the results using the 'n' key going 'nope, nope, nope'?

the old way

Stop wasting time with the old way of manually stumbling through manuals. Say goodbye to these problems once and for all!

Finally there's a better way!

Introducting Mansnip!

Mansnip is a revolutionary way to navigate through manpages, a tool that no terminal should be without!

It intelligently searches through manpages and outputs the snippets relevant to your query as self-contained browsable sections. Simply use it the way you use man, at the command line, followed by your search term(s).

Watch how mansnip can immediately find bash(1)'s declare without any extra effort:

mansnip is amazing

Mansnip works on any manpage.

With mansnip you'll just zip through documentation, saving precious time so you can write GitHub readmes like you're trying to sell Ginsu steak knives.

See how mansnip obediently shows everything with a "-z" option in the 25,888 lines of the zshall manpage on a single screen, all at once, in an easy-to-read manner.

zshall for all

But wait, there's more! You'll also get the line number and hierarchical context totally free!

We're still not finished yet!

You'll also get to install it easily through pypi.

Here's how do it

$ pip3 install mansnip-kristopolous

Act now, servers are standing by.

mansnip

FADE TO BLACK

END SCENE


Want more? Here's some background

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

mansnip-0.5.3.tar.gz (8.7 kB view details)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

If you're not sure about the file name format, learn more about wheel file names.

mansnip-0.5.3-py3-none-any.whl (9.0 kB view details)

Uploaded Python 3

File details

Details for the file mansnip-0.5.3.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: mansnip-0.5.3.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 8.7 kB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.11

File hashes

Hashes for mansnip-0.5.3.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 5628b91ab6ca258bfc3a4da50fb9035664c5d823da90a3e28a53d8e6ce194d98
MD5 e76eee7785e2da50b74e2ab50f1de83a
BLAKE2b-256 9198a392d04ce99798359829fccdfda9879e9faa0a398c1631214605ecec9e21

See more details on using hashes here.

File details

Details for the file mansnip-0.5.3-py3-none-any.whl.

File metadata

  • Download URL: mansnip-0.5.3-py3-none-any.whl
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 9.0 kB
  • Tags: Python 3
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.11

File hashes

Hashes for mansnip-0.5.3-py3-none-any.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 747f2fbbd56c64ce6175a81cf05302155bce907cacc3e92d0b8fbe850aad6b1d
MD5 333372a0dd52edf0e40cb3a4dd2f19dc
BLAKE2b-256 54be5d4078ed5b141186c9eb78f732d2c622b49c914217d2389aa3a703b73d80

See more details on using hashes here.

Supported by

AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Depot Continuous Integration Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page