Today's wish is for folks – and by folks I mean me – to stop using Web search for programming language docs when I can get that info via CLI.

Random Geek

Perl
: perldoc

Python
: pydoc

Go
: go doc

Pydoc and godoc let you drill down to a specific package / class / function, showing docs for whatever granularity you're at.

Any language doc browsers I'm missing? Specifically thinking

ships in default language tooling
query from and render to terminal
browse and search the language's standard library (in the terminal)

Phillip Upton

@randomgeek

If you run MacOS, I’d recommend looking at https://kapeli.com/dash

I do a fair bit of my programming offline and it is really nice to have when you need it.

Random Geek

@philsplace Dash is good. I've used it plenty. I'm thinking of CLI-specific stuff though. Minimize context switching for my ADHD brain.

Rick Scott 🏳️‍⚧️

@randomgeek ruby has `ri`, eg

ri Object
ri String.chomp!

genehack

@randomgeek man would love that for node/js

Random Geek

@genehack I'd even withhold the "ships in default language tooling" considering the ecosystem culture.

oh hey there's deno doc

genehack

@randomgeek oh shit am I gonna have to jump to demo?!

Random Geek

@genehack I hear they've improved Node.js compatibility.

Random Geek

@genehack Last time I directly poked at Deno, using Node modules was just a flat "no."

Micah

@randomgeek `man 3 $func` for any C standard lib stuff. Doesn't get better than that.

Random Geek

@m Is there a man invocation for header file docs? Like, after a bit of fiddling I found that random() comes from stdlib.h, part of the standard C library libc.

Is there man ?? stdlib.h or man ?? libc?

Micah

@randomgeek uh... not that I know of. I tend to just open the header at that point though, so maybe there is and I haven't found it...

Random Geek

@m This is probably where I'd pull out Dash or a similar tool, if discovery through documentation was my goal.

With go doc and pydoc I often start my browsing at the package level, derived from the ancient muscle memory of perldoc Package::Name.

I've made some serendipitous discoveries with that approach though, so I prefer tooling to support it.

Thomas Sibley

@randomgeek pydoc is incomplete, unfortunately. It's pulling from docstrings only, but lots of Python stdlib doc is not in docstrings; it's in the source rST files. e.g. compare `pydoc urllib.parse` with https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.parse.html. What pydoc see is often wholly different (and lesser) documentation.

Perl's got us spoiled, frankly.

Random Geek

@trs Agreed on the Perl spoiling. I look at Pydoc as a lightweight docs browser. Just enough to keep me going on packages, classes, and functions.