Where Is The Manual

Note, this application still under work, this is being published early just for name reservation.

Have you ever wondered where the manual is? I can find it for you, I hope.

What it does?

witm is a tool to access online and offline manpages and info pages.

Installation

Nix (recommended)

shell nix-env -f https://gitlab.com/Kores/witm/-/archive/main/witm-main.tar.bz2 -iA witm

Cargo (not recommended)

shell cargo install witm

Usage

shell witm ripgrep

By default, witm will try to find the manpage from your distro provided manpages site, you can specify which one to use with the -p flag.

shell witm rg -p freebsd

The problem

Nowadays, we have a lot of diversity in the package management area, we have the greatest package managers, like:

• pacman (& yay & paru)
• ports & pkg
• nix (also provides reproducible builds and promotes source distribution)
• apk
• zypper
• xbps
• flatpak (which is also a runtime and oriented for binary distribution)
• eopkg
• Portage
• Entropy (~~I feel sad about this one, seems abandoned~~)
• cargo (& cargo-update).
• gem
• opkg
• Nimble
• hex
• zigmod
• ...

The decent ones:

• apt
• yum
• dnf
• pip
• npm
• Homebrew
• Chocolatey
• Scoop
• ...

The almost decent ones:

• sdkman
• docker (sort of)
• ...

And the trashier ones:

• snap
• No, there is no other one, it is just snap.

They are not sorted in order of preference.

Okay, it's just my personal opinion (I'm lying, no, it's not, snap is really the trashier one, the others are miles away better), but you get it, we have a lot of ways to install ~~malware~~ software in our machines.

However, I always feel very uncomfortable with the fact that, it's not always that we can easily find a manpage for a package installed in a non-standard way, for example, if you install a package with npm (which the packages rarely ships any manpages whatsoever), cargo¹ or simply by downloading its binary, you wouldn't be able to read the manpages with man.

There are some alternatives, like, if they are in fact shipped with manpages but the package manager just don't support automatic installation (like cargo¹ and snap~~trash~~), one can simply specify a custom directory for manpages.

¹: Cargo is not meant to be a way for end-users to install packages in their system, although it's very common for devs to use it to install some crates, in cases where they are not available in the distro repository, or when they need special features not enabled by default (or any other reason, like, just because they can).