On 14/05/2026 13:20, Martin D Kealey wrote:
On Sat, 9 May 2026 at 22:15, Pádraig Brady <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > Pádraig Brady wrote: >> %% % a literal % >> %a Sun locale's abbreviated weekday name … >> %Z EDT alphabetic time zone abbreviation … Yes I suppose alphabetic is arbitrary. I.e. users generally want to know "what letter corresponds to <function>", not "what <function> corresponds to <letter> .". “It's slower to search by function” could be considered a feature rather than a bug. An alphabetical list is a great aid to memorisation, as rapid confirmations (*1) gives small dopamine hits, while the slower search for what you don't know provides encouragement to do better next time. -Martin *1: locating a letter in an alphabetized vertical list takes only 2 or 3 secades (eye movements), far faster than locating a semantic description among many lines of text.
Well if you want that, it's trivial to obtain: man date | grep ' %' | sort cheers, Padraig
