Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software developers

Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by AltNick on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @08:02AM (#36137326)

https://devdocs.io/ absolute recommendation

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Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by qbasic_forever on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @09:02AM (#36137872)

I wish it had a proper installable app. Relying on browser local storage is a nightmare since your browser will randomly and with no warning delete it all. The whole point of offline docs is that they're available... offline. On more than one occasion I've gone back to devdocs.io and everything I saved locally is wiped out, and of course I'm offline and just can't do anything.

Give me local HTML files I can stash in my filesystem. I actually just use wget to recursively archive entire documentation sites to local folders and serve them up with python's built in web browser. It's the only way to be sure I have accurate and up to date offline docs.

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Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by 0cf8612b2e1e on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @09:35AM (#36138236)

Sign me onto this same worry. It only takes one incident of offline mode borking to get upset.

Since the devdocs representation is so standardized, I have wondered if I could dump their database into SQLite and browse it with datasette. Should even be able to maintain text searching.

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Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by whitten on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @01:08PM (#36140750)

Could you elaborate ? What is datasette ?

Is the Zeal code open source enough that one could change the backend by replacing a small number of data access subroutines?

I think all you would need to change is setter code, since getter code wouldn’t be part of the interface. I think Zeal doesn’t write back any data, right ?

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Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by 0cf8612b2e1e on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @03:19PM (#36142770)

Not experienced with Zeal, but I have used devdocs, which is open source. Devdocs parses the relevant documentation pages and stores them in a more structured way inside a browser database file. I would prefer to keep that in a local SQLite file I fully control. However, storing the data is not enough, I need an easy way to search and browse the documentation. Datasette is a Python project which spawns a web interface to a SQLite database which gives an interactive way to explore the data. This interface should be sufficient for locally hosting and searching the documentation.

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Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by danieldk on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @09:22AM (#36138077)

Give me local HTML files I can stash in my filesystem.

Apparently devdocs does have an API to download docsets. I just installed the Emacs package that someone recommended in another thread and it let me download the docs.

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Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by newusertoday on Thursday June 01, 2023 @02:26AM (#36148123)

which package please?

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Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by denysonique on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @11:15AM (#36139319)

>your browser will randomly and with no warning delete it all

With Chrome based browsers this seems to happen usually on browser restarts after version upgrades, however With Firefox I have never had such issue

There seems to be an Electron Desktop client: https://github.com/gengjiawen/electron-devdocs

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Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by clone1 on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @11:20AM (#36139376)

I use this (https://github.com/astoff/devdocs.el) emacs package to download devdocs locally and access them from emacs, which is pretty great.

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Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by worldsayshi on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @05:42PM (#36144723)

Is there no browser plugin that can give a more reliable offline browsing experience than browser cache and more convenient than wget?

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Re:Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software dev... by hirundo on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @09:04AM (#36137893)

I love devdocs.io when it works, but almost every other time I open it, it has forgotten my documentation configuration and I have to start from scratch. I don't have problems losing cookies, etc., elsewhere. And I have a peeve with it asking me to reload the page over and over and over, and each time I do it loses my place. It's a great source otherwise.

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