Or is there maybe a way to set the pager for all help related queries to some command? I’m using bat and would like to pipe all --help through | bat --language=help by default for the syntax highlighting and colored output… Or if you know a lower effort way to color the output of --help let me know.
Not everything uses groff. A lot will have their own function or another.
Edit: I think for what you indicting you are wanting to try you’d need to either patch your shell of choice or write your own.
Edit2: If you did patch it, the best way I can think of to get something upstreamed would be to patch bash to use CTRL-Enter to automatically pipe the output to the default pager defined in BASHPAGER followed by PAGER if it doesn’t exist. Then set the BASHPAGER to your “bat” command.
Frankly, I would be surprised, if anything uses groff for displaying
--help, unless it shows the man page for that.The most basic implementation of
--helpis a manually formatted multi-line string written into the source code, which gets printed as-is.For dynamic layouting, you do need more logic, but rendering it to groff source code first does not make that easier. For tabbing, you print an appropriate number of
\t.At this point, someone has to have already made a prettier shell or terminal that is configured like this by default. Hideous 1950s monocolor --help output can’t be a novel issue in 2025.