rubydoc.info VS zeal

Yes, I use rubydoc.info to refer to the docs for gems, didn't realize until now that it also includes documentation for Ruby itself. Thanks!

GitHub will render markdown (and other formats), but I don't believe it supports parsing and rendering YARD or RDoc. Both tools ship with tools that generate documentation websites that you can use for your project. YARD also has https://rubydoc.info

Right now, gemdocs.org is very similar to rubydoc.info as it both uses YARD, with rubydoc.info supporting custom YARD plugins for gems (which might make some gem output look better if they specify said plugins). I have some ideas for improving Ruby documentation in general, so I've been trying to not add too much functionality to YARD as I might be trying to pivot back to RDoc.

The experiment is: can I pre-generate and store the docs forever? Everyone is probably going to say sure, stick them on S3 and forget about it. But how does that get funded? Who is going to pay for that? rubydoc.info is hosted via sponsorship.

rubydoc.info is supported by one person and is open-source. Care to report the problems here: https://github.com/docmeta/rubydoc.info ?

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/