One of our favorite developers Ingo Schwarze (schwarze@) writes in about a new feature that he just added to mandoc(1).

In OpenBSD -current, you now have an additional option to deal with that situation. After typing

$ man ksh

press the following keys:

: t c o m m a n d [Enter]

Now less(1) should have moved you right to the line where the "command" builtin command is explained. This currently works for

- command line options (: t x) - internal commands (: t wait) - environment variables (: t PATH) - command modifiers (: t sync in the dd(1) manual)

It also works across multiple manuals at once, starting with a command like

$ man -a csh ksh

Nothing changes for non-terminal output formatters or when running without a pager.

This feature isn't perfect yet. You know, one thing hackathons are useful for is getting new ideas started, and that is what I'm doing here. Known issues and things to improve include:



Support for more than one defining place, for example "neighbor" in bgpctl(8). That's even more important when looking at multiple manuals at the same time.



Support for more kinds of terms - in particular function names in section 3 manuals - and more intelligent heuristics for sometimes definitions won't be found at all, and sometimes, the jump will take you to a wrong place.



Making sure the temporary tag file isn't left behind even when man(1) is killed.

