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rtomayko
ronn
Ruby2012–2026
rtomayko / ronn

ronn

the opposite of roff

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
7Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

the opposite of roff

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-03-04 21:05:51 UTC to 2026-03-30 17:59:40 UTC.

012012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

7 sources
mwunsch·Mar 30, 2026
Author here. I've been thinking about this for a bit — most modern CLI/TUI tools (especially in the AI space) don't ship man pages. The format is structurally ideal for agent consumption: standardized, terse, offline, parseable. But nobody writes them because the toolchain is hostile. mansplain attacks this from two angles: 1. `generate` — point it at --help output, a README, or stdin and get a well-formed mdoc(7) man page via any OpenAI-compatible API. 2. `convert` — deterministic compilation of ronn-format Markdown to mdoc. Inspired by Ryan Tomayko's ronn (https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn), which I used years ago in some Ruby projects. It also ships as an agent skill (`npx skills add mwunsch/mansplain`) — any coding agent can learn to write man pages as part of its normal workflow, no binary required. The SKILL.md is the system prompt f
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or the CLI too, so they stay in sync. Written in Go. Ships its own man page, generated by itself. MIT licensed.
In Mansplain – Generate mdoc(7) man pages from –help output using LLMs
woodruffw·Dec 5, 2020
These are some pretty good guidelines! Many thanks to the authors for writing them up. Some nitpicks (what would HN be without nitpicks?): > If your command is expecting to have something piped to it and stdin is an interactive terminal, display help immediately and quit. I disagree with this advice: being able to spoon-feed input into a program is extremely useful, and is part of the "conversational" CLI paradigm that the authors mention above. Commands that silently block on `stdin` are frustrating, but the right solution is to check `isatty(3)` and print an informational message rather than killing the program entirely. > Check general-purpose environment variables for configuration values when possible Consider adding `$IFS` to this! Commands that support different output models based on `isatty(3)` often neglect to support `$IFS`, ma
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king them more difficult to use in pipelines. This is especially handy in pipelines that need to deal with messy or untrusted inputs; I regularly use `IFS` with the ASCII field escape bytes. > Don’t bother with man pages. Please do bother with them! Nobody needs to write raw roff or troff in 2020; there are plenty of high quality manpage generators[1][2][3] that will turn your Markdown/ReST/whatever documentation into sensibly formatted manpages. manpages are much easier to search than the medley of pseudo-formats that CLI tools choose to render their `--help` outputs with. [1]: https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn [2]: https://pandoc.org/ [3]: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/1.4/man/sphinx-build.html
In CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command-line programs

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