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.

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.

Good search and offline docs are not mutually exclusive. Grab the HTML version of Python's docs for example. You can search through them totally offline thanks to a bit of JavaScript they include.

Offline is way faster to the point the way you interact with docs changes because of the lack of friction.

I use vim and am always reaching for 'K' (simplified version is it shows docs for whatever is under the cursor) first then 'man keyword' in another terminal and as a last resort the browser.

Online docs gets in the way if I'm working on something and just want quick info. Being able to always read it even without a connection is useful as well.

Aeroplane

It's funny, I still fondly remember the Borland IDEs in the 90's when full, context-specific library documentation was a keystroke and less than a second away. All these advances in the power of an IDE, and searching google and picking the most relevant-looking result is the lookup paradigm now.