@b0rkJulia Evans Possibly relevant to your interests: https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2025/04/09/man-pages-are-great-man-readers-are-the-problem/

TIL man pages actually have some pretty decent formatting. The modern mdoc syntax has a semantic representation for flags (though it's mixed utility because it's used both in their definition list and in the main body of sections of the manual; in general though, a list item with a flag on it will be the flag definition, so .It Fl A is almost always the definition of the "-A" flag).

So given this detail, why are we still scrounging through manpages using partially-effective string matches to find a definition? Because by default, man rips its output through a terminal-formatter and then dumps it to less, and less doesn't give the end-user access to all that detail in the resulting file.

So there's room on the ground for someone to write a better manpage parser, then use man -w <name> to get the path to the file and consume it with that parser; just hasn't happened yet.