BSD man pages (and many Linux man pages, though a minority) are written in semantic “mdoc” macros, rather than the classic “man” macros that are strictly presentational.
If you’re using mandoc (http://mandoc.bsd.lv/) as your man(1) program—the default on OpenBSD and a couple of Linuxes like Void and Alpine—it will use these semantics to generate hyperlinks in the terminal using more(1) and less(1)’s ctags support.
So on my machine, your example becomes:
type man foo
type :t
type p
This brings me to the first instance of a command‐line flag named “-p” or environment variable named “p” in an itemized list.
It translates to HTML too—check out the links generated by the web viewer, which uses the same backend. https://man.openbsd.org/ls.1
If you’re using mandoc (http://mandoc.bsd.lv/) as your man(1) program—the default on OpenBSD and a couple of Linuxes like Void and Alpine—it will use these semantics to generate hyperlinks in the terminal using more(1) and less(1)’s ctags support.
So on my machine, your example becomes:
This brings me to the first instance of a command‐line flag named “-p” or environment variable named “p” in an itemized list.It translates to HTML too—check out the links generated by the web viewer, which uses the same backend. https://man.openbsd.org/ls.1