On: Practical Unix Manuals: mdoc

[beefhash]

Semantic markup has a use, at least on OpenBSD. You can use the semantic markup for searching manual pages, like this[1]:

> Search for manuals in the library section mentioning both the “optind” and the “optarg” variables:

> $ apropos -s 3 Va=optind -a Va=optarg

[1] https://man.openbsd.org/whatis.1

[nerdponx → beefhash]

I wish I could use semantic markup to jump to a definition, either of an option or a subcommand.

[yepguy → nerdponx]

You can actually. If you use mandoc instead of mandb, it automatically generates and passes tag files to less. Then you can just type ":t e" to jump to the docs for the -e option, for example.

[nerdponx → yepguy]

Interesting, so theoretically that is something that every distro could and should be doing?

[humanrebar → beefhash]

When does someone need to search for that sort of thing?

[beefhash → humanrebar]

A more realistic example might be that you're changing $LANG and now something broke. You can thus search for everything that uses LANG[1] and see what's most likely to have broken in what way.

[1] https://man.openbsd.org/?query=Ev%3DLANG&apropos=1&sec=0&arc...

[jwilk → beefhash]

There are some many things that are affected by locale environment variables (most of the time without documenting it explicitly), that this particular query is mostly useless.