16 ms·
Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software developers
- formerly_proven 3y agoDo you remember Qt Assistant? (Just slap "qt ass" in your type-ahead start menu!) Pepperidge farm remembers.
- mooreds 3y agoFirst posted almost a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6171667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6171667
- yboris 3y agoLooks great. Related product for comparison: Dash https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash
- warmwaffles 3y agoI loved Dash when using a mac. But I've been full time in linux for the last 6 years and Zeal is the only thing _close_.
- wzy 3y agoI saw this post and thought there was a new update... sadly, this app has been sitting at the same version since I built my PC years ago.
- tmarice 3y agoIf only it had Vim keybindings...
- Linux-Fan 3y agoFor me, the best documentation is often the manpages and perldocs, both of which can be navigated using VIM keybindings. For the remainder of documentation, I found HTML to be the “best” format and thus view them from the Web Browser even when using offline copies. To make them accessible, I use my browsers home page - a reduced version is shown here: https://masysma.net/32/ial.xhtml https://masysma.net/32/ial.xhtml - and in the most recent version it supports some rudimentary movements like hjkl...
- fuzztester 3y agoThe Norton Guides were good in their time, too. IIRC, Turbo C, 8086 assembly(?), Clipper, etc. were supported. It was a TSR too, so you could pop it up from any another app by a hotkey.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoZeal is ideal when you have no connectivity. And when you want low latency and no distractions. Also, http://devdocs.io http://devdocs.io, which implements the same functionality and supports offline browsing as well.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bityard 3y agoI have Zeal installed on my Linux desktop but I rarely use it. The reason is that most of the time, I want to read documentation for a specific version of whatever thing I'm using. Zeal only has docs for the latest version, or in some cases, major versions. Take Ansible and Python, for example. These tend to have breaking changes, new features, and hard deprecations in their minor version releases. So knowing that I'm looking at the docs for Python 3.8 vs 3.11 can be very important. One of my "someday" projects is to write a doc viewer with an obnoxious plethora of sources including docs shipped for every minor version of a program, docs for operating systems, man pages, info pages, maybe even wiki content for exceptional wikis like arch and gentoo.
- jnovek 3y agoThe opposite is also true: the JavaScript AWS SDK on Zeal is v2 and the bleeding edge is v3.
- Groxx 3y agoI've seen this in a lot of offline/fast/??? focused documentation systems... and I really don't get it. Version matters a lot to developers. Wouldn't the developers know this... being developers themselves? But then I see similar things in supposedly mature and even-more sophisticated systems, like mypy's typeshed which only supports a single version of external libraries' type declarations. How? What madness leads to this? Why not support multiple versions, and offer a way to select them per project from standard dependency declarations, so you're always reading the correct version?
- Hackbraten 3y agoDoes the Python documentation not meticulously list the entire history of changes at method level?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- meatjuice 3y agoI want this for my phone
- cca778 3y ago1. Download windows portable 2. Unzip & run 3. Install java 19 doc 4. Search for "List" on top-left search box 5. Wait 1 second 6. Zeal crashes 7. Try navigating, it crashes I haven't had such a bad first experience in years.
- Rochus 3y agoNice. The dependency of Qt WebEngine (i.e. Chromium) is a bit unfortunate (size, complexity); sure QTextDocument/QTextLayout/QTextHtmlParser/QCssParser is not sufficient enough for this?
- prima-facie 3y agoAgree, qt5-webkit takes ages to build on my machine
- kachnuv_ocasek 3y agoWasn't a browser like this integrated in Windows at some point? Just download a bunch of CHM files and you're good to go to the wilderness.
- tuyiown 3y agothe equivalent on macOS was to use Dictionary, but I suspect that it not really viable anymore due to format/rendering contraints: CHM probably needed IE6 like compatibility, after looking for docs, Dictionary needs XHTML, which might easily cool any enthusiasm
- destedexplan 3y agoOr use devdocs.io on the web. It works well offline.
- AltNick 3y agohttps://devdocs.io/ https://devdocs.io/ absolute recommendation
- qbasic_forever 3y agoI 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.
- clone1 3y agoI use this (https://github.com/astoff/devdocs.el https://github.com/astoff/devdocs.el) emacs package to download devdocs locally and access them from emacs, which is pretty great.
- denysonique 3y ago>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 https://github.com/gengjiawen/electron-devdocs
- worldsayshi 3y agoIs there no browser plugin that can give a more reliable offline browsing experience than browser cache and more convenient than wget?
- senko 3y agoHappy user here - Zeal (and Dash on MacOS) is an easy productivity win, even if you're online (Django online docs search is notoriously bad for some reason), and indispensable if on a spotty connection or offline.
- mberning 3y agoI still use dash 4. The newer versions removed the explorer tree and I don’t see any way to get it back. I feel like they make newer, worse versions, for the sake of selling upgrade licenses.
- predakanga 3y agoSame here - it's a shame because I'm happy to continue supporting the developer, but I won't pay for a functional downgrade.
- citrin_ru 3y agoLooks similar to CHM which was my favorite documentation format back when I was using Windows.
- omnicognate 3y agoI wish this approach were more supported by those producing documentation. Looking things up in reference docs is one of those cases where reducing friction yields huge productivity benefits, but I still end up using a search engine (Kagi now as Google hides authoritative reference docs under a pile of poor-quality, irrelevant spam these days). I've tried Zeal multiple times but while the app is nice and many of the docsets are good, many of them aren't good: badly formatted, badly indexed, outdated or simply nonexistent. A search engine requires no setup and covers everything. It's just so horribly slow. If we were grown ups, all software authors/vendors would be providing their reference docs in a standardised form, findable, downloadable and displayable by a wide range of tooling, consistent across languages, IDEs and platforms. Zeal is the closest we have, and it's a noble effort, but IME it doesn't solve the problem well enough to be useful because there's no buy-in from the people producing the docs. (First to mention ChatGPT gets slapped with a wet fish. Just try me.)
- kaycebasques 3y agoI'm a technical writer. I have felt this a lot myself. It is very comforting to know that the man pages are always there if I need them. Same with the Rust docs. And Beej's Guide to C Programming (I downloaded the PDF). Conversely, it kinda sucks to have to rely on a website to get info. I will kick off a discussion around offline docs in the technical writer communities that I'm part of.
- kaycebasques 3y ago* https://technicalwriting.tools/posts/offline-docs/ https://technicalwriting.tools/posts/offline-docs/ * https://writethedocs.slack.com/archives/C6D77HJ4F/p1685561398509429 https://writethedocs.slack.com/archives/C6D77HJ4F/p168556139... * https://www.reddit.com/r/technicalwriting/comments/13wvmbt https://www.reddit.com/r/technicalwriting/comments/13wvmbt
- bippihippi1 3y agorust docs is one of the reasons it's the so nice to use. Javadocs are nice but so many libraries have their own format. Everyone using the same thing makes it so much better
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- e12e 3y agoMaybe I'm blind - but i can't seem to figure out a) what you get when you pay for Dash on Mac vs download? Or b) why i can't use zeal on Mac?
- larusso 3y agoDash is a commercial software on macOS. The author created the whole docset parsing/plugin stuff and markets the tool. I use it for years and upgraded multiple times since it’s a timesaver. There has been controversy in the past about the tool since it is a glorified man page reader. The author even shared at one point his earnings and what he is doing with it. And no there is no zeal for macOS. I don’t know the details behind that deal. I can only say that zeal is not as good as dash. The integration into macOS is way smoother than what one gets on windows and Linux. I tried all versions.
- Croftengea 3y agoIt’s not widely advertised (probably this is the deal) but Zeal works fine on macOS, see this: https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/wiki/Build-Instructions-for-macOS https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/wiki/Build-Instructions-for... You don’t need to build it yourself, there is a brew formula.
- hn92726819 3y agoIIRC, Zeal and Dash have a deal with eachother - since Dash has no plans for non-mac devices, Dash told zeal the docsets can be used free of charge as long as zeal does not provide release builds on Mac. I believe you can build zeal on mac on your own.
- Karliss 3y agoHere is the github discussion created by dash author explaining the deal https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/issues/24#issue-17915169 https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/issues/24#issue-17915169
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoAnd lots and lots of third party docsets: https://zealusercontributions.vercel.app https://zealusercontributions.vercel.app
- whitten 3y agoThank you for the link. Is there a non-zeal way of creating a docs to processing one ?
- arcanemachiner 3y agoDash, but it's a paid macOS software (which does give a free trial). I'd be happy to hear of others, but the situation for generating docs is pretty dire right now (as far as I can tell).
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoIt's generally a pretty manual process, as there's no universal mapping from upstream documentation to docsets. When you're starting with Doxygen documentation: https://github.com/chinmaygarde/doxygen2docset https://github.com/chinmaygarde/doxygen2docset or https://pypi.org/project/doxytag2zealdb https://pypi.org/project/doxytag2zealdb. If it's Sphinx-like, then https://github.com/hynek/doc2dash https://github.com/hynek/doc2dash Otherwise is it probably best to look for a specific tool for the type of docs and then look through the GitHub submissions to the user-generated docset submissions for clues for specific code bases: https://github.com/Kapeli/Dash-User-Contributions/pulls?q=is%3Apr https://github.com/Kapeli/Dash-User-Contributions/pulls?q=is...
- TomMasz 3y agoZeal (portable 64-bit) runs on Wine on macOS if you don't need the Mac-specific stuff in Dash.
- larusso 3y agoI’m a happy user of Dash (macOS) for years now. Sadly Zeal is not 100% the same in terms of integration etc. at least I never got it running on windows and Linux like on Mac. I only use hot key setup (alt-space in my case) No fancy ide hot keys and such. There used to be some controversy (around 2015) when the author (single dev) put out yet another breaking version with new license upgrades. The free version was artificially slowed down. He added a new search backend and wanted to be compensated. So all users had to pay again. I upgraded 3 or 4 times. I think it’s a great tool that solves a problem. Some feel that he only wrote a parser/display tool and that the price is too high. I wished I came up with the idea though ;)
- rjzzleep 3y agoI didn't know zeal was being updated at all since the last "release" is almost 5 years old. I recently discovered devdocs.io and the emacs integration[1] and like it so far. [1] https://github.com/astoff/devdocs.el https://github.com/astoff/devdocs.el
- prox 3y agoCouldn’t one use Obsidian to do the same task? It sounds like it could.
- skrebbel 3y agoI use cheddar for this, it’s so versatile
- therealmocker 3y agoDo you have a link? Never heard of cheddar.
- macksd 3y agoI think skrebbel was parodying prox's reply as a commentary on drive-by comments about a seemingly orthogonal technology.
- Jemm 3y agoWish the site was clearer that Zeal serves ads.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoRemoved in the master branch, btw.
- ta988 3y agoGross
- aosaigh 3y agoI've tried to use an offline documentation browser a few times before (Dash on Mac) but have never really been able to get into the habit of using it. I generally just end up Googling for what I'm looking for. Outside of low-connectivity situations, what benefits do people find with these viewers?
- temp51723 3y ago> what benefits do people find with these viewers? I stop and think about the issue instead of just googling for an answer. Also, I removed the wifi card from my laptop so I can work from a room without ethernet letting myself get distracted by the internet.
- kaba0 3y agoGoogle has become a terrible search engine to the point that the first mention of the official documentation will be half a page down with some random version. I have to enter like 3 queries for the most trivial workflow of displaying the official documentation’s relevant pages. Also, even with high speed internet, it is several seconds at least, while zeal/dash will return it basically instantly.
- Linux-Fan 3y agoFor many queries, Google offers more of a "ready-made" solution e.g. from a StackOverflow post or blog. When looking at the offline documentation, I know that I am looking at a supported version (not something ancient or much newer than what is deployed in production) and that I am looking at the "authorative" answer i.e. the "real" docs not some third party comments. When the program I am developing is expected to run correctly even in the presence of errors, it makes a lot of sense to me to consult the authorative documentation rather than "the web" which rarely covers all of the possible corner cases.
- mindhunter 3y agoExceptionally quick lookups: alt + space and Dash is there with the search focused. I search and press alt + tab or esc to get back into my editor.
- XorNot 3y ago
- Zachsa999 3y agoThis software on Windows really is great (as of 1 year ago) specifically the font aliasing and size didn't match the rest of the system. It was way Smaller to the point of being unreadable for me.
- TekMol 3y agoPeople are not online all the time? Still manually search through documentation? ChatGPT, make a Haiku about this! Offline docs still used Death will take care of that soon LLMs, the new way
- slavapestov 3y agoSome of us prefer to read primary sources written by other humans, instead of a hallucinatory regurgitation from a probabilistic token stream model.
- djha-skin 3y agoA program on the bus without internet access so this is just perfect. I often download whole websites for this reason or bit better you can print pages off as PDF documents.
- torarnv 3y agoI wish I could use Zeal to browse the Apple documentation as well, but unfortunately that’s exclusive to Dash. I’ve even paid for Dash to get that feature, but no longer use it due to some UI changes in the latest version that add extra clicks for each search query, making the UI inefficient. Zeal seems to have be inspired by the old and efficient Dash UI, but I can’t have both that and the Apple docs from what I can tell.
- whitten 3y agoWhat was the feedback from the author when you told her that the extra clicks made it unusable ?
- torarnv 3y agoThe communication with the author (Bogdan) has unfortunately been lacking, taking very long to reply (months) and at best confirming the issues but without any plans to fix them. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434191 for prior discussion about my experience.
- Benlights 3y agoWhat are the advantages over https://devdocs.io/ https://devdocs.io/ ?
- glintik 3y agoOffline documentation browser for sad and unlucky developers without internet.
- fsiefken 3y agoIn the old days people had locally installed man pages. Documentation or manuals should be delivered locally by default. It's handy for when you are traveling and have no mobile internet connection, I've been in the alps where there was no network connection at all. It was very good to have everything I want to lookup (wikipedia, devdocs, cached browser history, epubs, stackoverflow) local. I can imagine it's handy to maintain focus as well, no internet distraction. For people who can't affort an network connection it's heaven. Instead of 'sad and unlucky' I'd say 'smart and lucky'.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ho_schi 3y agoZeal is great. I would appreciate it when Devhelp (Gtk) allows the user to install further docs. The requirement to place docs somewhere in “/usr/share” is obvious but doesn’t fit the user needs.
- wazzaps 3y agoDoes /use/local/share work? or ~/.local/share?