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man-db's man --global-apropos/man -k is slow. man --global-apropos --where RestrictNamespaces takes around 30 seconds on a fairly beefy laptop with an NVMe. Compare to find $(manpath | tr : '\n') -type l -printf '%l\n' | xargs rg --files-with-matches --search-zip RestrictNamespaces, which produces identical results in less than 2 seconds.

Is there some way to search through the entire man DB at a speed comparable to combining five other CLI tools?

It looks like this exists on other platforms since at least eight years:

NetBSD has a full text search implementation of apropos(1) which does search across the complete content of man pages instead of restricting just to the NAME section.

Running mandb 2.12.1.

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  • Which version of man-db are you using? -K performance was much improved in 2.10. I’m using 2.12 and I get results in around 1.5s.
    – Stephen Kitt
    Commented Jun 26, 2024 at 14:32
  • man -k on OpenBSD (which is using mandoc instead of mandb) is almost instant, even for nonexistant entries.
    – Vilinkameni
    Commented Jul 19, 2024 at 9:10

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