 In the last few months, it seems that everyone has suddenly decided that they must be perceived as being quote, woke, right? Everybody wants to be seen as being woke in regards to all these social injustices. Everybody wants to be seen as fighting that fight against racism and sexism and anti-Semitism and all the other isms. And so many of our free software projects and open source software projects, they too, are trying to figure out how they can be seen as being compassionate to these issues. So recently, a lot of our open source organizations started banning words that could be perceived as racist. So words such as master, slave, blacklist and some of our open source organizations are also trying to figure out how they can make their workplace more inclusive to women, because we all know the tech industry is completely male dominated, including the open source tech industry. It is completely run by men. One of the most glaring examples of the Linux community being insensitive to the issue of gender equality are man pages and some of the social justice warriors that have infiltrated the Linux community in recent years. One of the biggest questions they have to us is, why do we have man pages? Why does it have to be man? Can't we get that changed? Well, you know, who was fighting for man, woman equality long before so much of our population recently became cooked. The good folks over at GNU Emacs, that's who years ago, they introduced an alternative to man. They offered woman. That's right. In GNU Emacs, you have both man pages and woman pages, and it wasn't a reactionary response to the wild and crazy demands of some transgendered Satanist. No, they made woman because it was the right thing to do. So let me switch over to my desktop here and I'm going to launch Emacs here and let me zoom out and zoomed away in here. Let's zoom in a little bit on Emacs. What you need to do is you need to type meta X, which is the Alt key Alt X. Now, they do have man built in so you can actually look at your man pages using Emacs. You can do meta X and then type the word man. And then you can search for some man page. Maybe I want to search for the man page for man. So I type man and it actually looks like it's doing kind of like a fuzzy search or something because the first result is PC man FM, which I have installed on my system. Let's read the man page for PC man FM. That's just your standard man page being shown in this split here inside Emacs Q to get out of that man page split. But the more woke way to look at a man page is actually to do woman. So meta X and then woman hit enter. It's going to again ask you for the man page you're looking for. And again, I will search for man. Except this time it actually the result is actually man, which is great. Searching through woman is actually better than searching through man, at least inside Emacs here. Now, the negative for woman is that once you tell it, hey, I'm searching for the man page for, in this case, the man command, then it asks you which particular man page for man are you looking for because there's three installed on the system. There's man dot one man dot seven man dot one P usually the first one man dot one or program dot one is typically the one you want. I don't know why they bother asking and they ask it twice. So that's a little annoying that you have to go through those extra steps to finally get to the man page. But once you get to it, it's the same man page, right? It looks exactly like the man page. The difference is that you didn't have to type man, right? You didn't have to be this misogynistic a-hole, right? You could do meta X and woman and still get the same information. Now, one of the questions you guys, of course, are going to ask is, what's the point of having both man and woman in Emacs? If they essentially do the same thing, show the same information. What's the point? Well, the point is woman has some advantages over man. For example, you don't actually have to have man installed to use woman. And that's great because we don't want woman to be a dependent on man. You know, no woman should be dependent on a man. But beyond that, there's real world reasons why you don't want your woman pages dependent on man pages. Because not everybody that uses Emacs is using a good news slash Linux distribution. Think about the people that run Emacs on Windows or on Mac. Maybe they don't have man pages, right, especially on Windows. Do they have man pages and Windows? I doubt it. So they can't use the man command, but they could use the woman command. Another advantage to the woman pages is that it's entirely integrated in Emacs. You know, it's not dependent on any third party packages, including man, but any other packages as well, right? This is a built in thing to Emacs. And I can tell you guys that if you are using doom Emacs like I am, you know, the evil key bindings inside the woman pages work so I could J and K for up and down, or I could do control J and control K to move by sections, you know, up and down through the various sections. And of course, you could do a traditional kind of Vim search with the slash, just do a slash and then the search term. Maybe I want to search for table and you see table is highlighted and I could hit enter to go to it and in for the next table and in for the next table and in for the next table. Now, there is one minor disadvantage to woman. It really doesn't provide complete support for the Roth language. Roth is this text formatting language that man pages use. And some complex man pages, they're not going to render fully. They're not going to render completely using woman. So I haven't come across that yet. I haven't tried to look up a man page with woman and not have it render properly, but that is something that you might be aware of is that if you have a man page that's got some really complex stuff going on with Roth, you know, it may not render right. But other than that, I think woman pages are a better alternative to man pages. Now, I know some of you guys that watch my content, you guys don't like to identify as either man or woman. Is there something for you? Well, yes, there is. You don't have to use man or woman in Emacs. You could always install the TLDR plug in and then you could just do meta X and then do TLDR and then it's going to ask you what TLDR documentation are you searching for? Maybe I want the TLDR on the find command and then I hit enter and then I have the TLDR page for find. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Nate, Corbinian, Mitchell, Entropy UK, John, Devin, Archive 530, Chris, Chuck, DJ Donnie, Dylan, George, Louis, Omri, Paul, Robert, Sean, Tobias and Willie, these guys, they are the producers of this episode without these guys. This short little video about woman pages inside Emacs wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these woke ladies and gentlemen, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to help support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace.