groff/troff: MUH MINIMALIST Documents

groff/troff is a UNIX utility for creating and type-setting documents in a style similar to the later LaTeX, but much more minimally. In this video, I give a basic intro to it.

[altaccount]

If I may interject. The person you all have been referring to as Luke Smith is actually Gnu/Luke Smith or better yet Gnu layered on top of Luke Smith

[anqzavok]

Plain text files is the next step, and you will be rediscovering pen and paper soon after that.

[sellus]

Are you just procrastinating on writing your thesis?

[petewest]

groff > latex > R markdown > groff

[Solarplexus]

Officially giving up investing anymore time learning your newest minimal doc editor meme

[joseluisgerman]

This looks really useful for automatic document/report generation. Makes it look very easy to write scripts that output groff files based on software test/profiling/debugging/etc. I want to try it myself! Great video.

[MrHatoi]

_groff - front-end for the groff document formatting system_
Well that's very helpful.

[HiPhish]

There is also a technical reason for starting each sentence on a new line. When the last character of a line is the period ('.') groff will take that to mean that this is the end of a sentence and will insert extra space after the period. However, if the period appears in the middle of a line it will be understood to be just another character in the middle of a sentence.

TeX does something similar, but the other way around. A period is always understood to be the end of a sentence, so if you want to typeset something like "Dear Mr. Smith" you would have to write it as "Dear Mr.~Smith" to tell TeX that the period is not the end of a sentence.

[davidmaxwaterman]

I wrote a paper at university in nroff, back in '85 or so.

[romydrah]

Thanks, just rewrote my CV in groff. So much nicer than all that word processor nonsense.

[alcesmir]

I tried groff way back. Didn't stay with it since writing math in groff (through the eqn preprocessor) is a huge pain compared to LaTeX.

[phillphall]

These videos are incredible. I installed arch, ran LARBS, and can follow exactly what's going on. Using groff now because I was to put off by laTex. Thanks for slinging great stuff like this. I haven't used windows or mac for two months now. They are almost completely unnecessary

[senpie-if]

you memed me into using latex
and then you memed me into using rmd
and now you're memeing me into this

the ultimate minimalism is using a pen and paper, who even needs vim

[patrickmckowen]

more groff tutorials!!! There's tons of Groff text-based tutorials but nothing on youtube.

[nekoill]

C and Linux first caught my interest when I was in school, and I guess they won't stop haunting me to this very day, so I subbed feeling I can't avoid them for much longer. I don't know why, since I've always thought I was too stupid to really get the most out of them, but now YouTube seems to have teamed up with my tormenters, so looks like I don't really have a say in the matter, lol. Yeah, 32 years of age is just the right time to get neck deep in the Unix-based OSs and programming, sure, why not.

[seanld]

After seeing all of these (admittedly cool) typesetting tools, I can't help but appreciate Org-mode even more every time. It's so elegant and functional when editing/reading the plaintext, and it has all the necessary outputs as well, and can even be routed through Groff or LaTex for rendering. I think it'll be a very long time before something tops Spacemacs and Org-mode for me.

[mhellden]

I love your content, because you pick subjects that none other talks about (or is hard to get).
Please continue with the good work.

[GrahamAtDesk]

Back in the 1980's one of the most popular word processors (on MS-DOS) borrowed the idea of "dot commands". It was called WordStar. My dad raved about it. I used a similar shareware program called Word Fugue while I was still at high school. I could touch type at the time, and remember dot commands being a very efficient way to work. Your fingers never have to leave the keyboard's home row.

Also slightly related, I discovered um this week. It's a note making tool for writing and then reading your own man pages in Markdown. They're converted to nroff automatically when you read them (so they really do work like man pages). Perfect for making notes about terminal-based software you're learning, and then quickly looking things up later. Available in the Arch AUR, and homebrew. Also on GitHub.

[Erel]

I had decided to learn troff. I never did it because I decided that at 3 am, and had forgotten about it the next morning... Thanks for reminding me!

[oddbob]

groff is ffrog backwards. Coincidence?