Is there an easy way to filter all terminal commands that contain a --help flag?
Or is there maybe a way to set the pager for all help related queries to some command? I'm using bat and would like to pipe all --help through | bat --language=help by default for the syntax highlighting and colored output... Or if you know a lower effort way to color the output of --help let me know.
I think your best bet to to create a script called help and run "help
<command>
" and the script would do the rest.I think this is the correct answer in all honesty. Create a new script like help (or man2 or whatever) that pipes the argument through bat for you.
There has to be a hook somewhere for every command that executes. I'm not sure, but something in the chain after using set -x then running any terminal command likely is on the right path to doing this. (If you try set -x, you can turn it off with set +x). set -o options are another I'm not very familiar with but might be related.
set -x configures the running process, your shell. This is a posix standard flag. See https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html
there has to be a hook somewhere for every command that executes
Why do think this? I'm not aware of any shells that have such a feature. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be a new feature.
I like the other suggestion of having a wrapper script that does what you need.
I don't mind the idea of a wrapper it is just that most of the time, I'm looking at the last command, backspacing and then adding --help. After thinking about it, I will likely go the wrapper route, but add arguments that use the last command in terminal history automatically so that typing help- with no args runs a --help flag on that last command, 2::5 would add additional flags or arguments from the last command before --help and help- with any other args calls those instead of using history.
That should obviously be help!! like with sudo
You'd be intercepting all commands just to verify if they have a help flag and then if not executing them as they were intended. If the intercept got broke, then the shell would be completely broken.
Not everything uses groff. A lot will have their own function or another.
Edit: I think for what you indicting you are wanting to try you'd need to either patch your shell of choice or write your own.
Edit2: If you did patch it, the best way I can think of to get something upstreamed would be to patch bash to use CTRL-Enter to automatically pipe the output to the default pager defined in BASHPAGER followed by PAGER if it doesn't exist. Then set the BASHPAGER to your "bat" command.
Frankly, I would be surprised, if anything uses groff for displaying --help, unless it shows the man page for that.
The most basic implementation of --help is a manually formatted multi-line string written into the source code, which gets printed as-is.
For dynamic layouting, you do need more logic, but rendering it to groff source code first does not make that easier. For tabbing, you print an appropriate number of \t.
I agree, I just didn't want to make assumptions about how newer things work with localization these days.
At this point, someone has to have already made a prettier shell or terminal that is configured like this by default. Hideous 1950s monocolor --help output can't be a novel issue in 2025.
16 Color terminals didn't really start getting used until the 90s and early 2000s. And 256 after that. A lot of software was written back then and it would take a lot to add something that might not display well because of the terminal's color scheme and now we have color theming.
I wonder if Busybox or similar rewrites contain standardization that could be leveraged.
I am getting the feeling the you are mis-understanding than each project has their own independent implementing function and that each one would need to be rewritten. There a 10 of thousands of projects. This is not some simple, change 1 project task.
Why are you confrontational? I'm just casually tossing out ideas and learning. Of course I understand what you are saying. However, busybox covers the core of a POSIX system and with the size constraints, it is likely standardising something like this. On Gentoo, such a change might be more straight forward instead of some sloppy hack with a wrapper.
I imagine you must be good at memorizing a lot of information. I am not. I am good at abstraction and must explore in abstraction to understand heuristically. I understand heuristic connections better than most people. Neither method is better or worse. Being toxic about interchanges of information is useless nonsense. I know far more than I let on, but I'm well aware that I am a jack of all trades and expert of none. All the projects don't matter relative to those that are used the most. If most projects can be colorized, it will motivate others to fall in line or prompt rewrites assuming such a change was popular. Colorized manpages and help pages should be standard and should have been a decade ago. No one is using an IDE without syntax highlighting. The terminal is an extension of the abstracted language of Linux. Without universal syntax highlighting for new users in these spaces, Linux is presenting an outdated language format ripe for deprecation. These details have long term consequences.
No
I wasn't intending to come off confrontational, I apologize for that. I was looking at this from it sounding like you wanted any command on a system. I did find that you can colorize man. see script below for an example. As for busybox, it is a small project, so colorizing just it would be relatively easy and easy to add as a patch to a system. Not sure if that would upstream though as it is intended to work well on low memory systems among others.
#!/bin/bash export PAGER="less -r" export GROFF_NO_SGR=1 export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m' export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m' export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m' man ls
Edit: it does seem that this man colorization is disabled by default.
Edit2: "export MANROFFOPT=-c" can replace "export GROFF_NO_SGR=1" to limit just man.
Edit3: source Arch Linux bbs