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andykuszyk / noman.el

An Emacs package for browsing CLI command docs without man pages
GNU General Public License v3.0
14 stars 4 forks source link

Integration into (wo)man? #11

Open Thaodan opened 3 months ago

Thaodan commented 3 months ago

I wonder if it would be possible to integrate this into man to provide a fallback for programs without manpages.

andykuszyk commented 3 months ago

That's an interesting idea 💡

If there was interest from the maintainers of the man package, then I would certainly be open to it. However, I do think that man and noman fulfil different purposes. man is specifically a man page reader for Emacs, and is tailored to that use case. noman is an extensible parser for different types of command line help, and already has some hardcoded support for a few disparate programs (e.g. aws, npm). I think this makes noman more brittle than man, and more likely to fail when it comes across help formats that it cannot parse.

I don't think noman will ever be as general purpose as man, and I think its inclusion in man might make it a bit more confusing or ambiguous about what documents you're actually reading 🙂