> Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2026 07:42:38 -0600
> From: "G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
>
> > The WoMan package in Emacs is deprecated, have not seen any
> > significant maintenance for many years, and as result doesn't support
> > many directives used in modern man pages.
>
> Ah! Since that is the case, are there plans to withdraw WoMan from
> distribution?
Not that I know of, not without moving it lisp/obsolete/ first.
In the Emacs project we don't hurry to remove old and obsolete
packages, as some users might still be using them.
> If someone wants to revive it, they could always do so via ELPA,
> right?
Yes, but consider a plight of a veteran Emacs user who upgrades Emacs
to a newer version and finds some of its custom code and workflows
suddenly broken. Just to find that it's due to a removed package, and
that they need to download it from ELPA, could be a nuisance, if one
intends to do some useful work right after upgrading.
> > The supported Emacs command to read man pages is "M-x man", which runs
> > the system's 'man' command, and then displays what that produces.
>
> In GNU Emacs 27.1--which I acknowledge is pretty old--I see that "M-x
> man" _also_ passes through OSC 8 sequences mostly uninterpreted.
> ("Mostly": It translates the literal escape characters that begin these
> sequences into Basic Latin as the `^[` sequence, coloring them cyan.[1])
>
> I assume that bug has since been fixed. Can you tell me in which
> release it was? There's a non-zero chance the question will come up on
> the groff mailing list, and I'd like to be prepared with an answer.
If you can tell me how to test this and which man pages use this (or
from where I can download them), I could then tell you whether it was
indeed fixed and in what version of Emacs. (None of the systems to
which I have access have Groff 1.23 installed, so I cannot produce
these man pages myself, sorry.)
