feeds VS zeal

https://kapeli.com/dash

Somewhat similar tool to Autokey for MacOS that I use as a text expander.

Allows for great customization - appending ; to a phrase ensures you don't accidentally expand a keystroke into a phrase/URL/etc

";url" expands into "whatever string you configure"

This reminded me that I needed to settle on a good system-wide Snippets manager for MacOS.

Having waded through the morass of buggy and subscription-only services many times in the past, I thought to give the open-source Espanso another go, but its last commit was many months ago and I simply could not get it to recognise Ventura permissions.

It was then that I remembered that the excellent Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash), for which I had already paid a very reasonable one-off fee, has a snippets manager. And it’s perfect.

I use Dash for my API reference, partly because it also has all the other references I need for other languages. It’s easier to paw through when you’ve got exactly this sort of problem.

Dash. Look up documentation really fast. Also useful for system wide snippets.

Hey, the app I recommend shows you all the commands you need per app not just for macOS! Support for programming languages? Download this. For git, docker and neovim download this one.

Some time ago I had a thought that it would be interesting to make something like https://quickref.common-lisp.net/ but in form of docset for [Dash](https://kapeli.com/dash) documentation browser. This will give not only the search, but also a browsable documentation on all Common Lisp packages!

There's also Zeal (https://zealdocs.org/) which is basically the same as Dash but open source and runs on non-Mac devices.

For offline tech documentation you can use Zeal. Must have tool for poor internet connection places. Present in ubuntu repos. https://zealdocs.org/

ads don't have to proprietary

here's one example of ads in FOSS https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/issues/779

There’s stuff like https://zealdocs.org/ that allow you to take all relevant documentation with you so offline coding will work.

If you just want to be productive, you could also bring a lot of books or downloaded tutorials on a drive.

Btw, make sure your drive is encrypted and you think of a way to backup your data so you don’t lose the offline progress.

I’d suggest you look into Kiwix¹ and also Zeal².

1. https://www.kiwix.org/

2. https://zealdocs.org/

For offline documentation, I use Zeal (called Dash on macos) which looks/works almost identically to rubydoc.info but much faster since it's offline, has a standard interface for all installed language documentations, and only 1 global hotkey away while programming.

I highly recommend using local solutions to this local issue: Zeal[1] (aka Dash[2] on MacOS)

Load up the "docsets" of your languages (lightly edited HTML docs for indexing purposes) and use a global keyboard shortcut (F8 for me) to pull up Python/Postgres/Terraform docs, searching for the right function without internet query.

This isn't straight up applicable to all questions of course, but "How do I search regular expressions in Python again?" is now as easy as "re"

Note that the docsets can be converted from normal HTML ones via doc2dash[3], especially useful to load up custom docs like private providers.

[1]: https://zealdocs.org/