Very slow launch

[ethanuppal]

I just installed via brew install qman and noticed that the startup time is significantly slower than man's:

[plp13]

Hi @ethanuppal,

The culprit is the slow performance of macOS' whatis and apropos commands. (Qman uses these commands upon startup to "discover" the manual pages that are present in your system.)

Here are some instructions for effecting a workaround:

https://github.com/plp13/qman/blob/main/doc/OS_SPECIFIC.md#improving-performance

Alternatively, you could install mandb, and configure Qman to use it:

[misc]
system_type=mandb
man_path=/path/to/mandb/man
apropos_path=/path/to/mandb/apropos
whatis_path=/path/to/mandb/whatis
groff_path=/path/to/groff

I don't know about the quality of the mandb package on macOS, though.

[ethanuppal]

I see. Slightly frustrating that Apple can't ship decent tools for this. Are you against implementing platform-dependent code paths to handle this within qman automatically?

[plp13]

To tell you the truth, I'm appalled with the quality of the Unix environment provided by macOS. Its half-baked nature reminds me of a 1990s Linux distro in some ways. Even amateur systems like Haiku have done a better job.

I'm not against platform-dependent code, and there's already quite a lot if it inside Qman (and also config options such as system_type that let you configure it to match your system). That said, it's still a simple utility, a front-end to the standard Unix manual commands: man, apropos and whatis. And I honestly don't want to reimplement the functionality of those tools inside Qman, just because of a performance issue on a single platform.

IMHO, the best solution would be to include the workaround scripts in the brew package.

[xaizek]

(Qman uses these commands upon startup to "discover" the manual pages that are present in your system.)

Does Qman do it even when a manual page is specified? Asking because for me qman something is slower than both qman and man something on Linux.

[plp13]

Yes, it does. Otherwise certain features wouldn't work (specifically, those triggered with i, O, A, and W). It does add some latency, though not enough to be a problem (except on macOS).

It's not the only thing that slows things down, either. Qman has a bunch of features on top of man, and they all introduce a few ms here and there.

[plp13]

I'm not sure if there's much of a point in continuing this discussion, unless someone is interested in re-implementing apropos and whatis on macOS.

Shall I close the issue?