Man Pages Automatically Called

[9valkyrie]

I was working in VSCode in fullscreen and I swiped over to go to the desktop and a yellow box was there with one of the words from my code. I looked it up online and it said it was the man pages. I never ran the man pages like that. So apparently something ran a man page look up on whatever I had selected. Then today, Spotlight popped up and it filled in the word "man" automatically without me typing anything. Something keeps calling man pages, what is it? I did run a anti-malware scan and it found nothing. All apps I have installed are from identified developers, sig's checked.

2023 MacBook Air, macOS Sonoma 14.3.1

 

[tensixturtle]

I may be wrong but the first part with the yellow box reminds me of the lookup feature which is activated by force-clicking on a word to bring up its definition. Sometimes there’s a glitch I experience where I change the desktop and the box remains, which reminds me of the behaviour that you describe. Perhaps you inadvertently activated it? Spotlight search is tied in with other macOS lookup features, so that’s my best guess why it showed up there.

 

[9valkyrie]

Hmm.. I don't have force click enabled, so that might not be it. I haven't seen it lately, it may have just been a weird feature ("it's a feature not a bug"). I have been monitoring ps to see if I can catch it, but so far nothing.

 

[tensixturtle]

Do you by any chance have the "Look up and data detectors" setting enabled? Other than that I don't really have more ideas but hopefully it doesn't start doing it again.

 

[9valkyrie]

I do not have that enabled. Haven't noticed anything too odd in the past couple of days. Thanks for feedback.