# Pipe man into col -b to get rid of \^H

The man page reading club is returning soon. In the meantime,
here is a short post on a trick related to `man` itself that I skipped in the
[first post of the series](../2022-05-29-man).

## Vi rocks

A cool feature of vi-like editors is that you can insert the
output a command in the file you are editing, without doing any awkard
copy-pasting. You can do this with the `r` ex command:

```
:r !date
```

Inserts the output of the `date` command on a new line. You can also
use the `!` (bang) command, combined with a motion, to feed the
text between the cursor and the target of the motion to a command and
replace it with the output of the command itself. For example
I often use `!}fmt` to format the next paragraph when I am writing
an email.

## Man pages and ANSI escape codes

Unfortunately, if you try to use this feature to include parts of a man page,
you might not like the result. Typing `:r !man man | head` gives

```
MAN(1)                      General Commands Manual                     MAN(1)

N^HNA^HAM^HME^HE
     m^Hma^Han^Hn - display manual pages

S^HSY^HYN^HNO^HOP^HPS^HSI^HIS^HS
     m^Hma^Han^Hn [-^H-a^Hac^Hcf^Hfh^Hhk^Hkl^Hlw^Hw] [-^H-C^HC _^Hf_^Hi_^Hl_^He] [-^H-M^HM _^Hp_^Ha_^Ht_^Hh] [-^H-m^Hm _^Hp_^Ha_^Ht_^Hh] [-^H-S^HS _^Hs_^Hu_^Hb_^Hs_^He_^Hc_^Ht_^Hi_^Ho_^Hn]
         [[-^H-s^Hs] _^Hs_^He_^Hc_^Ht_^Hi_^Ho_^Hn] _^Hn_^Ha_^Hm_^He _^H._^H._^H.

D^HDE^HES^HSC^HCR^HRI^HIP^HPT^HTI^HIO^HON^HN
```

Not cool! This happens because manual pages are not made of plain text. They
contain *ANSI escape codes* to provide some basic formatting, like
bold text and whatnot (you might or might not see them, depending on the
capabilities of your terminal emulator). This is a complex topic and I don't
know much about it. Check out the excellent post
[Anatomy of a Terminal Emulator](https://poor.dev/terminal-anatomy)
by [poor.dev](https://poor.dev) if you want to learn more.

Long story short, the workaround is included in the man page itself:

```
When using -c, most terminal devices are unable to show the
markup.  To print the output of man to the terminal with markup
but without using a pager, pipe it to ul(1).  To remove the
markup, pipe the output to col(1) -b instead.
```

Indeed, using `:r !man man | col -b | head` gives:

```
MAN(1)			    General Commands Manual			MAN(1)

NAME
     man - display manual pages

SYNOPSIS
     man [-acfhklw] [-C file] [-M path] [-m path] [-S subsection]
	 [[-s] section] name ...

DESCRIPTION
```

Hooray!