Install halibut with Homebrew, apt, dnf, Nix, pacman, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• halibut

Project history

The official Halibut page explains that the idea came from Simon Tatham's work on NASM documentation, where he wanted web, printable, and online-viewable outputs from one source. An earlier Perl implementation proved the concepts but was slow and hard to maintain, so Halibut was rewritten in portable C.

Halibut's design is explicitly shaped by dissatisfaction with existing tools for this particular niche. The homepage compares it with TeX, TeXinfo, debiandoc-sgml, and DocBook, emphasizing multi-format output, pervasive cross-references, indexing, Unicode fallback, portability, and configurable output directives.

Adoption history

Halibut is a niche tool, but it persists because it solves a durable problem for maintainers of text-heavy software manuals. The project is associated with Simon Tatham's software ecosystem, and the official page provides both release archives and a public Git repository for development sources.

Its package-manager footprint is small but meaningful: users who package or build older software documentation can install `halibut` without adopting a larger documentation framework. Homebrew, Debian-family packages, Fedora-family packages, Arch-family packages, Nix, and openSUSE package names in the input show that the tool has enough downstream utility to be carried by multiple distributions.

How it is used

Users write Halibut source and run the `halibut` executable to generate manuals in several target formats. The supported formats make it useful for projects that want web documentation, printable documents, Unix manual pages, and legacy Windows help outputs from a single source.

The official documentation does not describe a user config file or credential store. Its main operational inputs are document source files and output-format directives embedded in or supplied with the documentation build.

Why package nerds care

Halibut is interesting to package nerds because it is a small, old-school build tool with a very specific documentation niche. It is not a general Markdown or DocBook replacement; it survives because some projects need exactly its multi-output manual pipeline.

The package is also a reminder that documentation generators are build dependencies. Even when end users never run Halibut directly, distributions may need it to rebuild man pages, HTML manuals, or release documentation from source.

Timeline

• 1999-2007: License text and historical copyright notices associate Halibut's early development with this period.
• 2004-2017: The 1.3 manual records manual copyright coverage across this period.
• 2021: Halibut 1.3 was released with the documented feature set on the official page.
• 2021: The official page documented the recursive Git clone URL and web repository browser for development sources.

Related projects

• NASM: project whose documentation needs inspired Halibut's original ideas.
• TeX, TeXinfo, debiandoc-sgml, and DocBook: documentation systems discussed in Halibut's rationale.
• Simon Tatham's PuTTY and puzzle projects: neighboring software ecosystem that uses documentation-oriented tooling, though not a direct dependency claim here.

Sources

• https://git.tartarus.org/simon/halibut.git
• https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/
• https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/halibut-1.3/
• https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/halibut-1.3/halibut.txt