Manual page width is fixed and I'd like it not to be

[Aaron Miller]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2004 at 01:18:07AM -0500, Aaron Miller wrote:
> 
>>Aaron Miller wrote:
>>
>>>Raye Raskin wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>>Hi! I've just been installing Cygwin on a new machine and getting 
>>>>>everything into the shape I like it, but there's something I can't 
>>>>>seem to figure out how to fix.
>>>>>
>>>>>I'm running XWin all the time so I can use xterms, but manual pages 
>>>>>seem to get formatted to 80 columns wide no matter how wide my xterm 
>>>>>window is. This is, as you may imagine, somewhat irritating, and I'm 
>>>>>at my wits' end in trying to find where to fix it.
>>>>>
>>>>>Has anyone any advice to offer? I'd greatly appreciate it.
>>>>>
>>>>>Thanks!
>>>>>
>>>>>-- Aaron
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Try making your font smaller so the man page width still fits your
>>>>narrow xterm.
>>>>
>>>
>>>Thanks, but that's the exact backwards of what I'm looking for; I 
>>>could've been clearer in my original message. The command line with 
>>>which I start my usual xterm sets it to 120 columns, and I frequently 
>>>size it up from there. This seems to be the usual mode of operation 
>>>under Unix; for example, when I've ssh'd into a Linux box from a Cygwin 
>>>xterm, manual pages are formatted to the terminal width instead of a 
>>>hard eighty(ish) columns.
>>>
>>>Thanks again.
>>
>>...and, wow, is my grammar lousy tonight, so
>>s/This seems to/Formatting manual page text to window size seems to/
> 
> 
> We have a mailing list for discussing x issues - cygwin-xfree .  Please use
> this mailing list for queries regarding xterm.  The xterm developer actually
> follows this list.
> 
> As a wild guess, however, I'm wondering if eval `resize -s` would fix your
> problems.

Thanks for the pointer, and I'll ask on the cygwin-xfree list as well. 
It's not really a query about xterm, though: using a shortcut that 
starts bash in a standard Windows command-shell which is 100 columns 
wide, if I ask for a manual page, I still get it formatted to eighty 
columns. I mentioned xterms since that's what I prefer to use, but it's 
not by any means a problem exclusive to those.

I tried 'eval `resize -s`', but that didn't help me any; the problem 
isn't in getting the terminal size to be recognized in general, but 
rather in getting specifically the 'man' command to recognize it.

Thanks again.

-- Aaron

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