alt Hacker NewsI mostly care about links inside the man page (look at man bash — there are tons of internal references like "described below under CONDITIONAL EXPRESSIONS" or "section SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below", or operators being underlined and looking like hyperlinks, which you can't easily interact with to just go to where they refer to. You have to employ full-text search, but it also turns up the references themselves, and good luck searching for the place where e.g. command "." is described) and links to other man pages, not the normal Internet URLs being clickable (those things are trivially copy-pastable into a browser next window).
Ah! Yeah, that makes more sense—I misinterpreted you at first since I don't normally think of “internal link” as the default exemplar of “hyperlink”. And yeah, I don't see good target markup for that. Stuff like starting your search regexp with “^ +” helps but is still janky. I'd tend to categorize this mostly as “man pages aren't meant to be long treatments of more complex software”, of course? Some large packages do something which I kind-of like but which I'm not sure would work well if everyone did it (mainly due to ergonomy around disambiguation) where they split up a bunch of their documentation into shorter pages with the origin as part of the section when making it accessible through man: pcap_init(3pcap) from libpcap, Bigarray(3o) from OCaml. Shells, as you notice, get hit by this really hard; Zsh tries to do some splitting in the man version of its docs, but it's really not enough, like I'd want to see fc(1zsh) (and then fc(1bash), etc.) but instead it's all in zshbuiltins. (Eventually I facepalmed when I realized an Info version was available and switched to that. The way I found this out was actually by eyeing the Zsh source tree and noticing that the documentation files were written in Yodl, which I'd never heard of, and then noticing that the schema they were using looked a lot like Info…)
… wow, hang on, I just checked for Bash, and it has an Info file but it says it's just an intro and the manual page is the definitive version‽ That's… hah. There must be some timeline jank around that; ambiguous NIH vibes around Info aside, I wouldn't have expected it from an actual GNU program! Did Bash show up before Info existed?