Slow consult-man

[nicolasdespres]

consult-man is slow on my machine. man is slow too but only the first time. The culprit is man -k which is slow on my machine (about 2s). man cache the result of man -k so that it is slow only when I start it but not every time if I change the search string. If I comment the line 'Man-completion-cache ; Don't cache across calls in man function definition, I get a slow man only at the first invocation, but consult-man keeps being slow when I change the search string from ls to printf for instance (I have set (setq consult-async-min-input 2)). It seems that consult-man runs man -k each time the search string changes.

[minad]

This is somewhat by design. consult-man assumes that man -k is fast enough for an asynchronous search. If it is not, the command is not supported. Which man package do you use? As far as I know man -k uses an index internally, at least on some systems. For some input man -k printf it returns pretty quickly on my system.

[nicolasdespres]

Hi, thanks for replying so quickly. I used to use the default man command installed with macOS. I never really used -k and Zsh was kind of fast. I have now installed man-db which does provide an index. Now, it is fast. Sorry for the noise. consult is great. I love it :)

[hmelman]

Just to be explicit, on macOS you installed man-db and at least with brew's defaults it installs gnu man as gman. Then you want to set consult-man-args to "gman -k" and probably manual-program to "gman".

[nicolasdespres]

Yes, that's what I did.

;; Use an indexed man db on OSX otherwise man -k is slow.
(when (executable-find "gman")
  (setq consult-man-args "gman -k")
  (setq manual-program "gman"))

I also ran gmandb to build the index.