Man pages give you an outline of what commands are supposed to do and the switches that can be used with them.

The man pages are kind of dull on their own. (I guess they weren’t designed to excite us).

You can, however, do things to make your usage of man more appealing.

export PAGER=most

You will need to install ‘most; for this to work but when you do it makes your man pages more colorful.

You can limit the width of the man page to a certain number of columns using the following command:

export MANWIDTH=80

Finally, if you have a browser available you can open any man page in the default browser by using the -H switch as follows:

man -H <command>

Note this only works if you have a default browser set up within the $BROWSER environment variable.