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Better Help Docs Searching?



Hello all!

The documentation for Zsh is awesome, when I can find the appropriate
part of the online pages / man pages.  Unfortunately, finding the
correct location in the docs is very hard -- e.g. when I'm trying to
find out what a given builtin / flag / option / etc. does.

A good example is the builtin 'read'.  Even knowing it's a builtin,
and searching the docs [1] / man pages for builtins, it's still not
very straightforward to find the docs on 'read'.  (There are 91
matches for "read" on the online docs and 82 in zshbuiltins).

I checked out the Zsh source, and can trivially find e.g.

$ git grep 'findex(read)'
Doc/Zsh/builtins.yo:1492:findex(read)

Which is neat, but not quite useful since reading the raw YODL text is
cumbersome.  YODL itself seems to be end-of-life / deprecated, so I
don't expect this situation to change, and it would be an immense
undertaking to rewrite Zsh docs in a different way.

All of that said, is there any way to easily find keywords / flags in
either the online docs OR the man pages -- rather than having way too
many matches for other things that mention the same word (e.g. "read"
as mentioned above).

[1]: https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Shell-Builtin-Commands.html

Thanks for your time,
Zach Riggle




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