just a fucking manual

jafm searches through all your man pages for a symbol, figures out which page actually documents it, and opens it for you.

i find it genuinely insane how fucking illiterate the default man command can be. i was making a simple http server in c and wanted the man page for sockaddr_in. every single time i tried man sockaddr_in it went: No manual entry for sockaddr_in. and this should work, because it works on linux. but, as it so happens, i am not on linux all the time. the docs for sockaddr_in were right there, inside another page (inet). so i had to somehow guess which random man page contained the thing i was looking for. jafm fixes that. it reads every page, ranks the hits so the real one is on top, shows you a picker with a live preview, and opens whatever you choose.

$ jafm sockaddr

that's it. i find it genuinely unacceptable that this is not an already solved issue. watch the demo here.

what you get

jafm searches every page in your manpath, in parallel, in a fraction of a second. it ranks by relevance so the page that actually documents your symbol floats to the top, tells you what it found and its kind (sockaddr_in (struct)), and gives you an interactive picker with a live man preview on the side and the match highlighted in the page.

usage

$ jafm --help
jafm 0.1.0 - just a fucking manual

greps your whole manpath for a symbol and opens the page that actually
documents it, because `man <symbol>` gives up way too easily.

usage: jafm [-1] [-l] [-e] [-t type] [-j threads] <symbol>
       jafm [-v | -h]

options:
  -1, --first      open the best match without asking
  -l, --list       just print what it found, open nothing
  -e, --exact      match the symbol as a whole word only
  -t, --type KIND  only show matches where the symbol is a KIND
                   (struct, union, enum, typedef, function)
  -j, --jobs N     scan with N worker threads (default 8)
  -v, --version    print version and bail
  -h, --help       print this and bail

by hachem <im@hachem.wtf>

in the picker: ↑/↓ or k/j to move, Enter to open, q to bail. pipe its stdin instead of a tty and it drops to a numbered prompt.

$ jafm sockaddr              # pick from the list
$ jafm -1 getentropy         # open the best match straight away
$ jafm -t struct -l sockaddr # every struct named *sockaddr*, printed
$ jafm -e -1 inet            # whole word, open the winner

build

needs a c compiler, zlib, and pthreads. nothing else.

$ sudo make install            # -> /usr/local/bin + man page
$ make install PREFIX=~/.local # or somewhere without sudo

it really is one file, so if you don't want the makefile:

$ cc -O2 jafm.c -o jafm -lz -lpthread

license

jafm is licensed under the mit license. see license for more.