Yeah, I enjoy hitting F3 twelve times to find the beginning of mkDerivation documentation - silly me, I must’ve known to search for “stdenv” documentation. Or having to find the source-code of makeWrapper because the documentation for it is mostly in the make-wrapper.sh. Or trying to find a lib function in the unsorted list of library functions.

But why is reference documentation in the “manual” anyway and loaded as a single html? The configuration options are also one humongous html, but separated from the manual. So it is possible to separate the manual, but it hasn’t been done for some reason.
Python uses sphinx or mkdocs, rust uses cargo doc, and C/C++ (+ other languages) use doxygen, and they generate multi page, static, documentation with quite reasonable search, but for some reason nix went the single document way requiring Ctrl+F.

It is slowly getting better, but I find external sources to often be much better than the manuals.

Anti Commercial-AI license