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I was thinking it would be cool to be able to look things up in the man pages the same way one looks up words with the "Dictionary" app.

Is there a way to add the man pages that OSX supplies into the Dictionary app so when you right click on a "word" (or in this case, a unix function/keyword/etc.), and click "Look Up in Dictionary", it can search for the word in the man pages too and integrate the search results into the Dictionary window?

So when the window pops up, the tabs across the top would be "All", "Dictionary", "Thesaurus", "Apple", "Wikipedia", "Man Pages". Or is this too wishful of thinking?

Marty
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  • or for that matter, javadocs, obj-c reference pages, etc... – Marty Mar 04 '12 at 22:52
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    Me, I want to go the other way: I want apropos to find the Java classes, too. It’s really incredibly stupid for every tool to have its own closed-off doc system. It means you miss things, and always have to go running a bunch of different commands to find anything. Vendors who ships tools without integrated docs should be shot. – tchrist Mar 04 '12 at 23:02
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    close for off topic? "if your question generally covers software tools commonly used by programmers, then you’re in the right place to ask your question!" I think man pages are a software tool commonly used by programmers. and this would definitely speed up man page searching when doing online reading, e-textbook reading, etc. – Marty Mar 04 '12 at 23:04
  • I’m not the close-voter. Stack Overflow now closes anything that can’t be answered with a few dicrete lines of code. The first thing is there’s no rhyme or reason to this. You’ll see shell scripting questions migrated to Superuser one day, to ServerFault another, and to Programmers a third. It’s really screwed up. – tchrist Mar 04 '12 at 23:08
  • yeah i posted that before your comment popped up. i agree though, it seems like with most languages I've used the documentation isn't very well set up. i mean, they're good, and definitely useful, but i would've expected more ease-of-use after all these years. especially on Mac, since there's so many other built-in convenience features. – Marty Mar 04 '12 at 23:11
  • This question was cross-posted at Super User... There is at least one Dictionary plugin for man pages, but it's not that usable. – Lri Mar 05 '12 at 06:02
  • yeah i didn't know which it applied to more so i used both. – Marty Mar 05 '12 at 09:09

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No. The Dictionary's support for Wikipedia is hard-coded; it's not pluggable. (There is a class internal to Dictionary.app called WikipediaDictionaryObj.)

  • http://superuser.com/questions/396909/is-there-a-way-to-integrate-the-unix-man-pages-into-osxs-dictionary-app/396974#396974 – Marty Mar 05 '12 at 09:24