Here’s a handy new feature tucked away in the Terminal in Lion. To quickly view the man page for any command, just right-click on it and choose Open man Page from the context menu. A new window will pop up, displaying the manual for that command.

This can save you a little bit of time, especially if you like to open up man pages in a new window alongside whatever you are currently working on. This way, you no longer need to open up a new window and type man <command> every time. It also displays the man pages with a distinctive yellow background, so its easier to distinguish if you have a lot of Terminal windows open.

As with a normal Terminal window, the colour scheme is also customisable. In the Terminal Preferences, just look under the Settings tab and choose the Man Page theme from the list.

The Open man Page menu item is also available from within the yellow man page windows. I find this really useful when I get to the “See Also” sections that are common at the end of many man pages. Instead of having to remember all the related commands and look at their man pages one at a time, I can simply right-click on each and simultaneously open up man pages for all of them.

Finally, there’s another menu item, Search in man Pages. This uses the apropos command to display a list of all the available man pages for commands that contain the keyword you have clicked on. As you’d expect, you can just right-click on any of the search results and choose Open man Page to view the relevant page.