Man pages like ascii

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1

On my Debian system, I had a bunch of man pages about general topic, in particular man ascii was super useful. They came from the manpages package.

What is the equivalent nixpkgs entry? NixOS Search - Loading... does not seem to find anything fitting.

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2

I am on nixos unstable and there is the package manpages. So you can try

nix-shell -p manpages --run "man ascii"
3

So obvious… but why does search.nixos.org, upon a search for “manpages”, not show the package manpages

4

I don’t know I used nix search to find it. I don’t like to use a webservice for such things, because my connection is slow, also it is one more level of indirection. And my local nix knows which channels/inputs I use the website doesn’t.

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5

The proper name is man-pages which is found by search.nixos.org as well. manpages is an alias and is thus not included in the search (to discourage its use).

6

Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense!

Although it seems fine for a search tool to also search the alias names, like it searches descriptions, as long as it shows only the real entry in the results? (Maybe that is technically not easy to do.) Suggested that at Treat alias names like description · Issue #345 · NixOS/nixos-search · GitHub

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