It seems I need to step up my marketing. 
Curtis Poe (Ovid) wrote perlfind — perldoc on steroids. My thought was “This is a really good idea; I should have thought of this! Oh, wait…”
Update: I’ve renamed it to
App::perlfind. See this article and the distribution on CPAN.
So, let me advertise App::perlzonji. The somewhat weird name is probably one reason Ovid couldn’t find the module, but it’s a bit late to change the name now, since I know that perlzonji has a few satisfied users already. Anyway, a lesson learned.
perlzonji describes itself as “a more knowledgeable perldoc”. It allows you to search for documentation on things that perldoc doesn’t know about. Some examples:
perlzonji xor
perlzonji foreach
perlzonji isa
perlzonji AUTOLOAD
perlzonji TIEARRAY
perlzonji INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR
perlzonji '$^F'
perlzonji '\Q'
perlzonji PERL5OPT
perlzonji :mmap
perlzonji __WARN__
perlzonji __PACKAGE__
perlzonji head4
perlzonji UNITCHECK
And best of all, you can extend perlzonji with plugins. The plugin system is based on Class::Trigger; plugins in the App::perlzonji::Plugin:: namespace are automatically loaded with Module::Pluggable.
For example, perlzonji comes with a plugin App::perlzonji::Plugin::SpecialPackages. It knows, among other things, that the CORE package is described by perlsub, and assumes that if you search for CORE::open, you might be more interested in the documentation for CORE than in that for open().
Here is the essential plugin code:
package App::perlzonji::Plugin::SpecialPackages;
use strict;
use warnings;
use App::perlzonji;
App::perlzonji->add_trigger(
'matches.add' => sub {
my ($class, $word, $matches) = @_;
$word =~ /^UNIVERSAL::/ && push @$matches, 'perlobj';
$word =~ /^CORE::/ && push @$matches, 'perlsub';
}
);
So, I hope you find perlzonji useful. If you have any suggestions on improving it, let me know. I already have a feature request from Steven Haryanto to make perldoc lib/Some/Module/File.pm work and hope to get around to implementing that next week.
If you really wish you could change the name, just re-release it under the new name and put a deprecation notice in the perlzonji docs.
Yes; Miyagawa said something similar — just put
App::perlzonjiin the new dist as well, increase the version, and redirect to the new module, plus deprecation notice. Something like whatPlack::Server::CGIlooks, I guess.Now we just need a new name.
Maybe Curtis and I can cooperate and call it
perlfind, or maybeperlknow,perllook,perlshowor something similar. Any ideas?I like perllook quite well, actually – better than perlfind in fact. The others… not so much. Other options that come to mind are perlwhat (I rather like this after letting it sink in for a moment) or maybe perlhow.
Ideally, though, wouldn’t it be perldoc -A or some such instead? Is there a reason this can’t or shouldn’t be added to Pod::Perldoc so that all users may profit from it? It may have to leave out a plugging mechanism – otherwise it seems the way to go. (Does that just provide an opportunity though, or do you see it addressing a need, other than maybe perlzonji’s own?)
Right; I like that it’s pluggable and that the user doesn’t have to know whether it’s a module, function, keyword or something else.
It’d be nice to somehow integrate it with
perldoc, however, sinceperldochas a lot more options.perlrwim (read what i mean)