manwhere

A fast, simple command-line tool to search man pages by keyword, written in Zig.

Usage

Basic Search

manwhere sleep              # Find all man pages mentioning "sleep"
# Output:
# sleep
# appsleepd

Interactive Selection with fzf

manwhere sleep | fzf | xargs man    # Select and open a man page

Section Filtering

manwhere -s 1 sleep         # Find only commands (section 1)
manwhere --section 3 sleep  # Find only library functions (section 3)
manwhere -s 1 -s 3 sleep    # Search sections 1 and 3

Help

manwhere -h                 # Show help message

Building

Prerequisites

• Zig 0.15.1 or later

Build Commands

# Debug build (for development)
zig build

# Release build (installs to ~/.local/bin)
zig build release

Example Workflows

Find and open a man page

manwhere printf | fzf | xargs man

Quick lookup with preview

manwhere sleep | fzf --preview 'man {}'

Scripting

# Find all SSL-related functions
manwhere ssl | while read name; do
    man 3 "$name" 2>/dev/null && break
done

POSIX Compatibility

Works reliably on:

• Linux: Standard /usr/share/man and /usr/local/share/man
• macOS: Standard paths plus Homebrew (/opt/homebrew/share/man) and MacPorts (/opt/local/share/man)
• Other Unix-like systems: Standard man page directory structures

License

This project is open source. See the source code for license details.