vue-styleguidist VS JSDoc

Yeah there’s a recent issue with the main docblock not being detected when using

Unfortunately, I found no way to add JSDoc comments to the counter-update event. I think it is currently not supported in vue-docgen-api, which Storybook uses under the hood to extract code comments into descriptions. Leave a comment if you know a way how to document events in Vue 3.

At my workplace we set up a small component library for stuff that we regularly (re-)use. It has gained quite some traction within our workplace so now we would like to write a proper and easy to use documentation. We would love to use something like vue-styleguidist which relies on jsDoc to generate a website to showcase and develop components.

I found some promising things like Vue Styleguidist (https://vue-styleguidist.github.io/), but unfortunately it only supports Vue 2 by now. My question is: Do you have experience in documenting your Vue 3 SFC? What tools or toolchain do you use?

Most of the frontend stack at Ecosia is built around with Vue. We also had a design style-guide built using Vue Styleguidist. Our style-guide is essentially a list of all the Vue components used across our frontend applications.

Few days ago I worked on a vue-styleguidist project and I had to use a Google Font.

You may like JSDoc[1] if you just want some type-safety from the IDE without the compilation overhead.

It’s done wonders when I’ve had to wrangle poorly commented legacy JavaScript codebases where most of the overhead is tracing what type the input parameters are.

Personally, I’m impartial to TypeScript or JSDoc at this point. But I’d rather have either over plain JavaScript.

[1] https://jsdoc.app/

I wholeheartedly agree. At most, I introduce JSDoc[1] to newer developers as standardising how parameters and whatnot are commented at least gets you better documentation and _some_ safety without adding any TS knowledge overhead.

[1] https://jsdoc.app/

This is where JSDoc comes to save the day.

The best way to do this, of course, is with JSDoc. But something I always found awkward about jsdoc is defining the object types in the same file. So, after a lot of reading, I found a way to combine JSDoc with declaration type files from Typescript. Let me give you an example:

There is a lot of specific symbols presented on the JSDOC specification that can be found here: https://jsdoc.app

JSDoc is a specification for the comment format in JavaScript. This specification allows developers to describe the structure of their code, data types, function parameters, and much more using special comments. These comments can then be transformed into documentation using appropriate tools.

Working with new features, frameworks, and tools, the experience of reading documentation is a critical part of it. I have been lucky to work with projects that feature really easy to read documentation such as USWDS and Bun, but I've also had the misfortune to work with pretty terrible documentation like JSDoc. The JSDoc documentation lacks a search field which makes searching for specific items an ordeal and also does not cover many hidden use cases. It provides less than the bare minimum for what it needs to do - a lot of the time I am forced to rely on external user documentation elsewhere to use JSDoc effectively. That was why I was drawn to the search field in particular in Docusaurus.

The Svelte team followed suit but motivated by the maintainer's developer experience as they migrated the project away from TypeScript in favor of plain JSDoc comments for type annotations instead.

Even more relevant, tools like Javadoc, JSDoc, Doxygen, etc. read comments in a specific format to generate documentation. These comments do not affect readability. On the contrary, Javadocs are great for explaining how to use these entities. Combined with tools like my dear Doctest, we even get guarantees of accuracy and correctness!

Document types with JSDoc annotations