Intellij Man Page Editor

This project was built with Claude Code. I have very little experience with Kotlin or Java though all the code was reviewed by me, and the plugin was tested thoroughly by hand.

A Jetbrains IDE plugin for editing and viewing man pages (groff/roff format).

Features

• Syntax Highlighting: Full syntax highlighting for man pages and groff files
• Live Preview: Split-view editor with rendered man page preview
• Auto-completion: Suggestions for macros, commands and escape sequences
• Structure View: Navigate through sections of the man page easily
• Hover Documentation: Quick info on macros and commands

Supported IDEs

• All Intellij-based IDEs, platform version 2024.3 and greater

Requirements

For the preview feature to work, one of the following tools must be installed on your system:

• mandoc (recommended) - Modern BSD man page processor
• groff - Traditional Unix documentation system

Installing Rendering Tools

macOS:

brew install mandoc
# or
brew install groff

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu):

sudo apt-get install mandoc
# or
sudo apt-get install groff

Installation

1. Download the plugin from the JetBrains Marketplace
2. Or build from source (see Development section)

Development

Prerequisites

• JDK 21 or later
• IntelliJ IDEA (for development)

Building the Plugin

./gradlew buildPlugin

The plugin will be created in build/distributions/.

Running the Plugin in Development

./gradlew runIde

This will start a new IntelliJ IDEA instance with the plugin installed.

Running Tests

./gradlew test

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.