> surely it would have to be a cross-distro effort No. Each person that wants to write a manpage just needs to decide on their own what format they want to wri

> surely it would have to be a cross-distro effort No. Each person that wants to write a manpage just needs to decide on their own what format they want to write it in and use a tool that converts that format to nroff. There's no need for coordination amongst anyone, and this way there's no risk of breaking existing manpages. There's multiple such tools. Here's one: https://github.com/mvertes/txt2man https://github.com/mvertes/txt2man It's in the main repos of at least Archlinux and Debian. > maybe Markdown isn't the perfect format without modifications. But it's always felt like a natural evolution to me I don't think Markdown supports the indentation conventions of manpages.