It seems the mailing list doesn't like my message for some reason. Let me try again for the 3rd time...
Forwarded message from onf on Mon Jan 20, 2025 at 2:27 PM: Hello Ingo, On Mon Jan 20, 2025 at 3:27 AM CET, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > onf wrote on Mon, Jan 20, 2025 at 01:48:19AM +0100: > > On Mon Nov 4, 2024 at 4:03 PM CET, onf wrote: > >> On Mon Nov 4, 2024 at 1:45 AM CET, Alexis wrote: > >>> "onf" <o...@disroot.org> writes: > >>>> While you can absolutely get a list of manpages containing a > >>>> specific term of a specific type with apropos (like the example > >>>> you gave), what I was getting at is that you can't say to your > >>>> pager "jump to the flag -e". [...] > >>> [...] > >> [...] > > > Actually, BSD mandoc does implement this, it's just documented at > > a poorly visible place in the docs. BSD mandoc's man(1): > > You have a point here. I noticed myself in the past that the > prominence of this feature in the documentation is significantly > smaller than its usefulness. It's also documented in mandoc(1), > type either of these commands to see for yourself, > > $ man -O tag=tag mandoc # works on OpenBSD and perhaps on other BSDs > # maybe even on Alpine, Void, or Chimera Linux > $ lynx https://man.openbsd.org/mandoc#tag /* works everywhere */ I can confirm it works on Void; that's my daily driver and it's using mandoc to format its manpages. I've actually discovered this feature only thanks to coming across Tg in mdoc(7). > Admittedly, that's not particularly discoverable either. > > I tried to think of a more discoverable places in the past, but all that > came to mind so far were inacceptable from a systematic perspective. > > I'm open to suggestions, though; maybe you have a good idea > for a better place? I think putting it into the opening of man(1) might not be a bad idea, actually: The man utility displays the manual page entitled name. Pages may be selected according to a specific category (section) or machine architecture (subsection). When MANPAGER is less (the default), it is possible to jump to definitions of terms defined in the manual using the less command :t. That's just a draft; I'm sure it can be worder better. > [...] > > The definitions are generated automatically, so all manpages written > > in mdoc benefit from it. I assume groff mdoc + man-db doesn't > > implement this? > > Not that i know of. It would actually be much harder to implement > in groff than in mandoc because a full roff(7) implementation, by > the basic design of how roff(7) works, lacks a semantic parse tree. > So by the time you get to the output processors, they have no syntactic > information left that they could work on. It's all presentational > at that point. Hm, I don't think I agree. The macros could emit device commands which implement this. ~ onf
