About iMan
iMan is a graphical viewing application for UNIX man pages (textual documentation files). iMan provides a Mac OS X native Aqua interface as an alternative to use of the man program via the Terminal.
A variety of useful features have been implemented in iMan, including:
- Pleasant Aqua user interface with multiple viewing windows.
- View man pages as well as any man-format file on disk (great for previewing).
- Supports
aproposandwhatisdatabase searches, as well as in-page search with regular expressions. - Browser-style history (forward and back within any window).
- User-customizable font styles.
- Handles links to man pages in several forms (man:groff(1), man://groff/1, and man://1/groff are all supported). If you have iMan installed, click here to go to the man(1) man page.
- Reusable framework core can be embedded in other applications to provide man page handling functionality.
iMan is written in the Objective-C language using Apple's Cocoa frameworks. It currently runs only on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and up. The BSD subsystem must be installed. iMan is made available under the BSD License, giving you broad freedom to use and modify the application and its source code.
Screenshots
 iMan Viewing Window |
 Search Window |
Download
The current release of iMan is 0.3b1. This release features updates and polish to the user interface, numerous bugfixes, and substantial improvements to the underlying engine. Please note that this is a beta release: it has been tested and found to work, but is known to contain bugs which will be ironed out before the final release.
You can download iMan v0.3b1 here.
Source Code
iMan source code is currently available from the project's Mercurial repository on Sourceforge. (A source snapshot will be released alongside version 0.3 and later releases).
Contact
The author of iMan is David Reed <david@ktema.org>. Questions, comments, bug reports, patches, and code are welcomed to the above address.