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.

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.