[konfekt]

Which make version does the latter command use? For GNU make 4.2.1 on Linux, I hade more luck with something along the lines of

    @awk '/^[a-zA-Z_-]+:[^#]*## .*$$/ {match($$0, /## (.*)$$/, arr); printf "\033[36m%-30s\033[0m %s\n", $$1, substr($$0, RSTART+3)}' $(MAKEFILE_LIST)

[JonChesterfield]

Looks like 4.3 but I don't think it matters - awk vs gawk/nawk might be significant though, gawk 5.2 on the machine I ran this on.

The match with substr is interesting. It's more complicated than setting the field separator to something like :|#+ but should mean : in the help text works. For something one only writes and debugs once, probably better to do the complicated thing that always works.

gawk will write the groups to an array, that's possibly more legible (and slower? should be slower than the leading non-capture //)

  @gawk 'match($$0, /^([a-zA-Z_*.-]+):.*## (.*)$$/, arr) {printf "  %-30s %s\n", arr[1], arr[2]}' $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | sort