What's the easy way to convert all man pages to html?

Solution 1:

Install Bwana which allows you to browse the man pages in your favourite browser.

To quote the page above "Just type "man:" followed by the man page you're looking for into your browser's URL field. Hit enter and let Bwana do the rest." It has live links.

Solution 2:

bcat lets you pipe stdout to your default browser. An alternative to your Preview function would be:

bman () 
{ 
    : Display man page in default browser
    man $* | col -b | bcat
}

...or simply set man's pager:

export MANPAGER='col -b | bcat'
man grep

bcat works with any command that writes to stdout:

pbpaste  | bcat
make test | bcat
tail -n 1000 -f /var/log/messages | bcat

...etc.

It's a ruby-gem, so installation is as easy as:

gem install bcat

If "on the fly" conversion isn't sufficient, and you want to produce HTML all at once, or in advance, this post on Unix.se has a number of suggestions (sadly one of my favourite tools, the mighty pandoc, won't work for this...)