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Show HN: Omniref - a better search site for Ruby documentation
- montanalow 13y agoTim & I are planning to spend quite a bit more time on this, what do you other devs want to see in documentation search? Full stack? Multi version? Comments? Examples? IDE integration? What would make your life better?
- csmattryder 13y agoSome feedback I have, is that I would like the sidebar to have a view that was less 'cluttered'. I know what String#new does, so could I just view all the methods available - sans description? Like how ruby-doc does it, super fast to spot what I need to lookup and click it. Another is that the sidebar seems to take up a fair bit of space (especially as I use a half-sized browser window). I really want to see this flourish, it seems a lot faster than searching ruby-doc! Keep at it, guys! :)
- timr 13y agoThanks! Is this more like what you're looking for? http://www.omniref.com/docs/ruby/stdlib/2.0.0-p247/classes/Array.html http://www.omniref.com/docs/ruby/stdlib/2.0.0-p247/classes/A... We're still working out how to display the search results, but we definitely want to strip them down more. Thanks for the feedback.
- csmattryder 13y agoYep, that's it. Would love to just click the one from the results, then have that view. But if I have to then click the name on the right, that's fine too.
- derwiki 13y agoEnumerate options that are obscured by inheritance. For example, to look at: http://www.omniref.com/?q=cache_action http://www.omniref.com/?q=cache_action I don't know what options are valid in `cache_action`. The "real" answer, AFAICT, is to keep walking up the source code until you find the AbstractWhatever that actually defines the options.
- timr 13y agoYeah, rails makes this as hard as possible to figure out, because everything is done dynamically by Hash arguments. Maybe we can do something like like link up the inheritance tree from the method?
- atmosx 13y agoI would like to have code examples in many libraries. But I'm not sure how you could achieve this... Maybe linking stackoverflow related posts in some way.
- timr 13y agoThis is on the feature short-list. We actually had it in there early on, but we weren't happy with the quality, so we pulled it. We're going to re-try with a different approach that we think will work better. It's definitely going to happen.
- JonnieCache 13y agoLoad the rdoc for all of rubygems/github into it. Like rdoc.info et al
- timr 13y agoWe already have all of the documentation for all of the current ruby gems, plus the ruby standard library. We don't yet have all versions of everything, but that's coming soon. AFAIK, we're already more comprehensive than the existing sites, though.
- JonnieCache 13y agoAh. It seems that for some reason I searched by the gem name, which obviously came up with nothing.
- timr 13y agoHm. You searched for rails, or something else? http://www.omniref.com/?q=rails http://www.omniref.com/?q=rails Let us know if there's a bug.
- JonnieCache 13y agohttp://www.omniref.com/?q=fuzzy_match http://www.omniref.com/?q=fuzzy_match doesnt take me to http://rubygems.org/gems/fuzzy_match http://rubygems.org/gems/fuzzy_match
- william_hc 13y agocomments for sure. Could be as simple as disqus on endpoints like the angular docs.
- jaredgrippe 13y agoIt would be awesome if I could upload (or just post) my Gemfile to your site and be able to search only the gems I am using.
- timr 13y agoI've wanted this since the beginning, so this is coming soon. ;-)
- jaredgrippe 13y agoawesome! I cannot wait! :D sign me up for any beta action you got :P
- timr 13y agoHeh. We skimped a bit on the "beta" invite thing. Send me an email (addr is on my profile) and I'll let you know when it's ready.
- jaredgrippe 13y agoIt would also be nice to use chrome's "tab to search" feature so I can just type: "omniref" [TAB] [query]
- jc00ke 13y agoThis!
- treystout 13y agoI've always liked what Mercurial's docs were trying to do (http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/customizing-the-output-of-mercurial.html http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/customizing-the-output-of-me...) by having comments at every paragraph of their docs. It's done about 10% as well as it could be though. You almost want stackoverflow style questions to link to direct paragraphs or maybe even sentences. Maybe overlaying something like rap genius' tools on existing docs is enough? Looks really nice so far, but I don't use ruby so can't vouch for accuracy of search etc...
- dljsjr 13y agoThis seems to be a Bryan O'Sullivan thing, as the online version of Real World Haskell looks the exact same. http://book.realworldhaskell.org http://book.realworldhaskell.org
- yale 13y agoLooking great. My only wish would be having a list of constants and methods in the sidebar after selecting a class or module.
- timr 13y agoThanks! We have this other document view that we're going to make more prominent in the coming days: http://www.omniref.com/docs/ruby/stdlib/2.0.0-p247/classes/Enumerable.html http://www.omniref.com/docs/ruby/stdlib/2.0.0-p247/classes/E... The "preview" that shows up from search pages links to it, but it's definitely not obvious where/how. We'll fix that!
- montanalow 13y agoRight now, the Table of Contents navigation is only visible on full documentation pages, but I'm working on some javascript to make it work in a nice way for the search results previews too. Also working on making it more obvious how to get to the full doc pages as well.
- mek 13y agothis is awesome! I am going to start use it right now and come back with some feature requests in a few! :D
- mckaym 13y agoI also like APIdock. They show the version history of a method - http://apidock.com/rails/v3.0.0/String/camelize http://apidock.com/rails/v3.0.0/String/camelize
- YorickPeterse 13y agoLooks neat!
- emmett 13y agoImproved crossreferences! The main problem with Rails docs today is that methods mention other methods by name, but there's no way to jump directly to that other method.
- timr 13y agoIt's pretty tough to always know the right method in the general case (e.g. method from another module), but we think have some ideas that we're working on that will greatly improve this. If nothing else, we can trigger a search for methods with that name. We're going to do that very soon, actually.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- atmosx 13y agoThank you, awesome, bookmarked :-)
- xacaxulu 13y agoOhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh yissssssssssssssssssss!
- znowi 13y agoVery nice. One note though. When I look for "puts", I get OpenSSL::Buffering#puts when I'd expect Kernel#puts. "kind_of" gives me RSpec::Mocks::ArgumentMatchers#kind_of. I think you should assign proper weights.
- timr 13y agoWe've done a lot of work to weight things correctly (e.g. searching for "inject" does what you'd expect), but we definitely need to do more work on really common tokens like "puts". We'll add those to our bad search list. Thanks for the feedback!
- montanalow 13y agoWe're looking at several other signals than tf/idf right now, but the really big improvements in quality will come from static & runtime analysis of all the publicly available ruby code for just this sort of case. I'll make sure these get added to our ever growing list of QA queries so we can make sure they improve.
- william_hc 13y agoLooks solid. Set it up with Alfred.app right away. Looking forward to continued support!
- immad 13y agoCan you do this for Rails too?
- montanalow 13y agoWe've indexed every ruby gem, including rails.
- timr 13y agohttp://www.omniref.com/?q=rails http://www.omniref.com/?q=rails :-)
- immad 13y agoAwesome!
- moonie1 13y agoIs there some way I can view my own ruby project with this? like by pointing it at my github repo url/ssh url?
- timr 13y agoIf your gem is published, we'll pick it up automatically during the next index run. If not, we're thinking about adding the ability to index public repos -- but private ones are longer-term. What do you need?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- latortuga 13y agoAnyone looking for functionality like this in a local, offline reference should check out YARD[1]. I (embarrassingly) only recently set it up to serve a set of my common gems and the ruby standard lib and it works and looks great. [1] http://yardoc.org http://yardoc.org
- timr 13y agoYou should be careful with YARD -- we've found a number of bugs in it that lead to broken/missing documentation. The ruby standard library, for example, is missing huge chunks of its documentation if you use YARD instead of RDoc. I very much wanted YARD to be a drop-in replacement for RDoc, but it's not quite there yet.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- endgame 13y agoDo you have an api? It would be nice to be able to make emacs do M-x ruby-apropos foo and pick something.
- Thibaut 13y agoWell done! I've also been trying to improve Ruby's documentation with DevDocs: http://devdocs.io/ruby/ http://devdocs.io/ruby/
- DanielRibeiro 13y agoWow, it works with symbols: http://www.omniref.com/?q=+ http://www.omniref.com/?q=+ http://www.omniref.com/?q=[] http://www.omniref.com/?q=[] http://www.omniref.com/?q=- http://www.omniref.com/?q=- http://www.omniref.com/?q=* http://www.omniref.com/?q=* Quick tip: You have this tiny styling issue here: http://i.imgur.com/4uxUuPO.png http://i.imgur.com/4uxUuPO.png
- timr 13y agoUrgh, thanks for the heads up. Making code blocks wrap correctly is non-trivial. We'll add that to the bug list.
- crashandburn4 13y agoVery nice. symbol hound just isn't that great so it's good that at least rubydocs can be searched properly for that spaceship and stuff. aw, can't find the stabby lambda, but at least you've got a nice 404 page :) http://www.omniref.com/?q=-%3E http://www.omniref.com/?q=-%3E
- timr 13y agoWe need to give more love to symbol search - most are fine, but the query analyzer doesn't do well with all combinations. We'll add that one to the bug list. Glad someone found the 404 page, at least. ;-)
- ufmace 13y agoI like the speed of the search and most of the layout. It could really use some kind of Table of Contents for the current entry, though. For more fanciful ideas, it would be neat if there was a way to add links to particular paragraphs or sections so you can link to any relevant blog posts or StackOverflow questions that explain the intricacies of something in more detail. Especially if it was easy for readers to add them in themselves.
- timr 13y agoWe do have a ToC view for everything we index, it's just not totally obvious how to get to it right now (from search, click on the header in the preview window -- those links go to the view you want). For example: http://www.omniref.com/docs/ruby/stdlib/2.0.0-p247/classes/Array.html http://www.omniref.com/docs/ruby/stdlib/2.0.0-p247/classes/A... That said, you're totally right about this needing to be more visible, and we'll have something better for this in the next day or so. "it would be neat if there was a way to add links to particular paragraphs or sections so you can link to any relevant blog posts or StackOverflow questions that explain the intricacies of something in more detail. Especially if it was easy for readers to add them in themselves." We've had multiple requests for comments, so that's definitely going on our short list of new features. Thanks for the feedback, and let us know if you think of anything else.
- mikeruby 13y agopretty sweet!
- robblchen 13y agoWould be nice to have the logo as a favicon.