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.
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.