[HN Gopher] DevDocs
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DevDocs
Author : jakogut
Score : 161 points
Date : 2024-01-12 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (devdocs.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (devdocs.io)
| jakogut wrote:
| Hey, folks. I'm running down my checklist before a long trip. I'm
| preparing by downloading language and API docs in case I want to
| do some development in the air and figured I'd share this great
| tool. It allows for easy offline documentation access for a lot
| of languages and APIs. I'm hoping to brush up on some Zig and
| maybe do something fun with Vulkan. Happy new year!
| esafak wrote:
| Like an open source Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash). Noice!
| bluish29 wrote:
| There is already open source dash (https://zealdocs.or)
| although they don't provide Mac build because of an agreement
| to use some of dash's lists.
|
| But you can build it on mac
| (https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/wiki/Build-Instructions-
| for...)
| hu3 wrote:
| typo in URL: https://zealdocs.org/
| sph wrote:
| I've been missing Dash so much since I moved back to Linux, on
| my todo list is to create a Web based clone, that supports
| custom packages which was Dash's killer feature. And with top
| class Emacs integration, instead of having to context switch to
| a browser.
|
| Currently focused on launching another project and I will have
| to get back to it, my productivity has tanked now that I
| constantly need to have a browser tab or three open on
| hexdocs.pm and MDN
| kelsolaar wrote:
| Dash makes it really easy to pull docs from readthedocs.org
| also, this is something devdocs does not have.
| kosasbest wrote:
| MDN[0] is usually my goto reference for frontend stuff. I know
| DevDocs has the offline feature, but frankly I can't develop
| without an Internet connection. I tried it, and failed terribly.
| Besides MDN, developers need quick access to Google and ChatGPT
| to go forward, quickly.
|
| [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| I was recently on a flight where the "wifi is down" and wanted
| to get some coding done. I already had some LLM models
| downloaded, so I quickly pulled down the fauxpilot repo and
| made sure I had everything needed for when we were in the air.
|
| My expectations were really low, but I was surprised at how
| productive I was with just DevDocs and an LLM. I might have
| even been more productive than normal because there wasn't any
| internet distractions.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Been relying on this site for years
| filedottsx wrote:
| First time I've come across it. It's great!
| imbnwa wrote:
| Oh yeah, having a one-stop-shop for docs that can act offline
| is so useful. It has an API and I a have Neovim plugin that
| provides its feature set in my running neovim instance.
|
| If they were to get more mobile/platform-specific stuff like
| Apple docs, Android, Windows especially (all of the supported
| SDKS lol) it would be a magical place.
|
| Now add the ability to comment on docs like the PHP docs and
| we're _really_ setting off
| vinnymac wrote:
| When programming on the go, I've found this to be useful.
| Especially if the WiFi is flaky.
|
| I also enjoy having documentation consolidated. If man, mdn, and
| devdocs were combined into a single standard interface it would
| be a great boost to my productivity.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| I just revisited my "SWEs want offline docs" blog post from a few
| months back: https://technicalwriting.tools/posts/offline-docs/
|
| Is there any kind of technology similar to RSS that lets you
| announce that your docs are offline-consumption-friendly? I don't
| mean service workers or anything like that. I mean some kind of
| standardized format for enabling users to read your docs offline.
| All I've ever seen are PDFs and self-contained HTML sites
| packaged as a ZIP. Anything else? Half-baked idea, but just
| asking in case something already exists and is not on my radar...
| slimsag wrote:
| I don't know if there's anything better than a zip. For our
| website[0] which includes a bunch of docs for our game engine,
| Zig packages, etc. we just offer a link "offline version of
| this site" in the footer which is an ~80MB zip file.
|
| I think the challenge with zip files is.. do you want all the
| images? do you want all versions of the docs, or just a
| specific version of the docs? It's hard to tailor the zip to
| the user's desire. But zip still seems to be the best.
|
| [0] https://machengine.org/
| mdaniel wrote:
| I used to get a lot of good mileage out of firefox's ability
| to render sites out of zip files as in
| jar:file:///home/foo/site.zip!/index.html but they nuked that
| pretty recently :-(
| eitland wrote:
| Say what you want about Mozilla but they work diligently to
| remove every competitive advantage they have!
| sleepytree wrote:
| Not a complete answer, but I hope Markdown is or becomes the
| standard for offline docs and text for local/offline
| consumption. I only ever write in markdown anyway (usually with
| http://obsidian.md).
|
| The closest thing I know of for a service like RSS to download
| documents is [Dash for macOS - API Documentation Browser,
| Snippet Manager - Kapeli](https://kapeli.com/dash).
| packetlost wrote:
| There's also Zeal (https://zealdocs.org/) which is basically
| the same as Dash but open source and runs on non-Mac devices.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I first learned of Zeal several months ago...and i really
| like it. But, i forget about havign zeal installed and
| available, that my reflex is to instinctively reach for
| duck duck go, or stack overflow, or somesuch search engine,
| etc. So, i just gotta build up the habit. :-)
| techwizrd wrote:
| I understand completely. I even wrote an offline
| documentation browser [0] for Linux similar to Dash, and
| I reflexively search online too. It's a hard habit to
| break, but I think it's a UI/UX issue.
|
| 0: https://github.com/techwizrd/tarpon
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Markdown is too anemic for documentation without extensions.
| Sure, you can make do, but I would rather wet standardized on
| something more powerful.
| hiatus wrote:
| There is a "docset" format in use by dash.
| https://kapeli.com/docsets
| n49o7 wrote:
| I've been using Zeal. It doesn't have everything (yet?), but
| it's very relaxing.
| ymherklotz wrote:
| I mean you could ship GNU info documentation (for which I saw a
| quick mention in the Blog post, but thought I'd mention why I
| like it). These can be generated from a variety of sources,
| including markdown. When installed alongside your app, they
| would show up in the top level heading when launching info,
| making it nicely discoverable if you use info.
|
| As a bonus, this means the documentation will always be up to
| date with the version you are using. I guess if you want to
| look at older or newer versions the downside is you'll have to
| download the app.
| madsbuch wrote:
| often a static website distributed using git.
|
| a locally runnable version of the online site can be started
| locally.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Wait, why do we want offline docs? Good search is important,
| but there have not been many times in my last 10 years that I
| have needed something to be offline.
| devjab wrote:
| Some people don't always have a fast (or any) internet
| connection when they work. In those cases it can be nice to
| have offline versions.
|
| I imagine this is useful for a lot of people around the
| globe. I don't use the broader internet a whole lot when I
| work, but I do use the official documentation pages when I
| forget how basic things, partly because my memory isn't great
| but also because I work on multiple languages and don't
| always remember how they each do specific things like
| splitting strings, reducing arrays or whatever. If I couldn't
| just go to the official language documentation's I'd need
| offline versions.
| viraptor wrote:
| Even with fast internet, the other end is not always great.
| Trying to click through a few nodes of AWS documentation
| can be a quite bad experience some days. Especially
| combined with their not great search. That 5s here and
| there starts adding up if you're trying to research
| something you don't know very well.
| layer8 wrote:
| CHM [0] is that, but it's basically Windows-only. It's a pity
| that Microsoft abandoned it.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I love devdocs, but I'm forever salty that they don't include C#
| as one of their languages.
| tonymet wrote:
| if the C# docs have a flexible license , then you could add
| them
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Unfortunately it seems to be the opinion of whoever controls
| the devdocs language requests[1] that the MSDN boilerplate
| license[2] is not permissive in this regard. However, devdocs
| is notable enough that they could easily at least _ask_ for
| the written permission.
|
| [1] https://trello.com/c/PVnfdeaN/26-suggest-new-docs-here
|
| [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/termsofuse
| Pathogen-David wrote:
| Certain parts of Microsoft Learn are permissive, most
| .NET/C# documentation is Creative Commons Attribution:
|
| * Conceptual docs: https://github.com/dotnet/docs
|
| * BCL: https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet-api-docs
|
| * ASP.NET Core: https://github.com/dotnet/AspNetCore.Docs
|
| * WinForms/WPF: https://github.com/dotnet/docs-desktop
|
| The C# language specification is unfortunately a bit
| fuzzier, but the conceptual docs above include what most
| people want:
| https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/discussions/4855
|
| The updated unified C# language specification is CC, but
| it's still catching up to modern C#:
| https://github.com/dotnet/csharpstandard
| jve wrote:
| MS docs ar now on github. Licence lists "CC-BY-4 and MIT
| licence found" https://github.com/dotnet/docs/tree/main
|
| Yeah, I saw that devdocs and the like don't include what was
| previously not cross platform and not popular for linux guys:
| C#, msbuild.
| Apreche wrote:
| Thank you. This is terrific. Wish I knew about it earlier. So
| much better than using web search engines when I know I'm only
| looking for results from official documentation. Also so much
| faster. I think I'll get a copy and run/host it locally.
| baal80spam wrote:
| Getting quite a few 404s on various links...
| nu11ptr wrote:
| I'm not familiar with this, can someone give some context? I
| assume this is all harvested from other sources and just gathered
| here? Or is there some original content? How up to date is it
| typically?
| bmartin13 wrote:
| This is amazing! Mad props to whoever helped get this running.
|
| I would love to see C# in this list!
| rubenv wrote:
| Only gripe here, and it's not a devdocs problem per se, is that
| Firefox deletes the offline documentation if you haven't opened
| devdocs in a while.
|
| Is there any way I can turn that off, preferably on a per-site
| setting?
| voytec wrote:
| This site's cookies seem to be issued for some 2 months. You
| can extend cookies' lifetime in Firefox globally and per-site
| but a cookie can (and in most cases should) be invalidated on
| the server side.
| tonymet wrote:
| dedoc is an offline CLI tool to download, search , read devdocs
| from your CLI. great way to help avoid context-switching to the
| browser (which has it's own distractions)
|
| https://github.com/toiletbril/dedoc
|
| It's statically compiled in rust so you can download and install
| the binary
| johncoltrane wrote:
| FWIW, a little Vim plugin for searching DevDocs:
| https://github.com/romainl/vim-devdocs
| pocketarc wrote:
| Used this on a 14 hour flight recently. It turned it from a
| wasted day to an insanely productive one. No distractions, and
| the docs were there to answer the occasional question.
|
| It's so good even if you just want to unplug.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Sounds fantastic. Sometimes the restrictions on what you can do
| are freeing.
|
| What's the modern equivalent of a Linux netbook? I want a
| little machine that's too underpowered to browse the web so I
| have no choice but to concentrate. Maybe Chromebooks have taken
| that spot but I don't want more Google in my life.
| simon04 wrote:
| I'm one of the few maintainers.
|
| Updating docs to a new release is easy unless the documentation
| system (such as react.dev redesign) or design is rewritten. Some
| projects seem to do this on a regular basis.
|
| Some documentation generators generate random class names (such
| as .gtWOdv, .ezMiXD, .gOhcvK on docs.npmjs.com by Gatsby) which
| makes cleaning the docs from superfluous content (such as on-page
| navigation) very cumbersome and flaky.
|
| Monthly, we auto-generate a list of outdated docs, here is the
| latest: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/devdocs/issues/2105
|
| Help is always welcome. :-)
| atticora wrote:
| This is a very frustrating app for me. It is one of the best
| document sources out there but has become unusable because it
| cannot retain my selection of documentation. Almost every other
| time I visit I have to start from scratch picking the stack I
| use. It's great but not great enough to keep doing that over
| and over and over ...
|
| I don't have an issue with dropping cookies or local storage
| elsewhere. I'm on an updated linux chrome. Any ideas?
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I'm thinking ChatGPT can probably do a lot of the heavy lifting
| in this cleaning step, have you considered integrating your app
| with OpenAI's API, or perhaps an open model like CodeLlama?
| imbnwa wrote:
| Is there any discussion around eventually providing commenting
| like the PHP docs of old (I don't know what the PHP docs now
| look like off-hand as I write this)?
| bakje wrote:
| > I don't know what the PHP docs now look like off-hand as I
| write this
|
| The styling and layout changed somewhat, but the content is
| pretty much the same, comments and all.
|
| Today: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fgetcsv.php
|
| 15 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20081218125142/http
| s://www.php.n...
| epolanski wrote:
| Hey simon04, I wanted to let you know that many many years ago
| the work of you maintainers made all the difference in my
| career and later my life.
|
| Being able to read docs offline while commuting for some
| software I was pressed to work ended up being very important.
|
| I just really wish you to know that albeit you may have not
| made a single $ by helping devdocs you are helping real human
| beings and making world a better place.
| bomewish wrote:
| Kind of amazed that while programmers' whole game is to develop
| systematic solutions to annoying problems... our own most basic
| need hasn't been really met this way?
|
| For instance devdocs does not have a bunch of libraries that I
| use regularly (selenium bindings in python, etc). I also tried
| Dash but wasn't able to just 'get' for eg the openai docs and had
| to go to their website. Meaning I was robbed of the cool features
| of dash, being able to quickly search structured content.
|
| Just seems ironic.
| zikani_03 wrote:
| I love this tool, and it's one of the tools I recommend to a lot
| of my fellow developers and emphasize the importance of RTFM.
| Thank you so much to the maintainers for keeping this going for
| so long!
|
| Love it and use it very often.
| have_faith wrote:
| I've had this as a pinned tab in my browser for many years.
| Probably the only thing that has stayed the same in my browser
| over that time.
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(page generated 2024-01-12 23:00 UTC)