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 -xthen running any terminal command likely is on the right path to doing this. (If you tryset -x, you can turn it off withset +x).set -ooptions are another I’m not very familiar with but might be related.set -xconfigures the running process, your shell. This is a posix standard flag. See https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.htmlWhy 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 typinghelp-with no args runs a--helpflag on that last command,2::5would add additional flags or arguments from the last command before--helpandhelp-with any other args calls those instead of using history.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.
The --help output must be getting passed through groff at some point to create the layout with tabbing. Wherever that is happening must have a point of entry. Perhaps it only requires modifying groff with a filter function or something like that?
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.
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.
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
--helpis 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.