elvish
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No man pages
As far as I can tell Elvish doesn't ship with man pages for the shell or it's builtins
No manual pages, but the documentation at https://elv.sh/ref/ is top notch. I usually just look things up there. However, as the sources are in Markdown, it should be possible to render it in man page format fairly easily.
It'd be incredible to have documentation you can quickly pull up right from the elvish shell -- it'd make it much quicker to learn the language. I'd be happy to help render the existing documentation to man pages if that's the right approach for elvish.
(fish, emacs, and ipython all handle this well, tho in very different ways)
With respect to @jtmoulia's comment I'll point out that fish
has a man
function that prefaces the directory containing the man pages for its builtins to the $MANPATH
env var before invoking the real man
command. It is a borderline trivial function that depends on little more than the fish man pages being in a predictable location embedded in the fish binary at build time; i.e., set -l fish_manpath (dirname $__fish_datadir)/fish/man
. Where $__fish_datadir
is a semi-private builtin var. Elvish shouldn't, obviously, do it exactly the same way. The point is that by using a similar model it is not only possible to support man elvish
but also man count
and man other-random-builtin
when typed in an elvish REPL session. How to extend this to extensions provided by epm
is TBD.
Note that a help
command will be merged in the near future. That addresses the question of how to get the documentation for embedded (i.e., builtin) commands in an interactive context. Obviously, it might still be useful to have the equivalent of https://elv.sh/ref/command.html as a "man" page but it's not clear there is enough value to justify doing so.
#1432 is not enough. Making doc:show
to be help
is a start. 3rd party module don't have documentation either.