If you’re looking for a TUI alternative to Devdocs/Zeal/Dash, you are in the right place.

Dedoc

Dedoc is a small CLI tool for fetching documentation from the Devdocs API. It’s written in Rust and it just works.

Commands

  • dedoc fetch - Get the latest metainfo of available documentations.
  • dedoc list - List all available documentation, have to be run after dedoc fetch.
  • dedoc download <doc> - Download the documentation.
  • dedoc search <query> - Search for a documentation. Also supports opening the documentation if -o flag is passed.
  • dedoc open <index> - Open the documentation.

Problems

The main problem with Dedoc is that it doesn’t have a lot of features implemented yet, like fuzzy search and quick preview of the documentation. So you should search for the documentation using dedoc search, copy a documentation index, and then pass it to dedoc open. Using the -o flag in the search command, you can open the first result, but it’s not really convenient, as you don’t know what exactly you’re opening.

Workaround

Let’s cover the problems above using fzf (it’s a command-line fuzzy finder, really powerful) and bat (a cat clone with syntax highlighting).

Script

Here is my fish script for that. If you don’t know what fish is, it’s a shell like bash or zsh, but more user-friendly, and it is certainly worth trying.

function dedoc_parser
    for line in (dedoc search "$argv[1]" "$argv[2]" | string split '\n')
        set has_entity false
        if string match -q -r '^\s{0,3}\d+.*$' -- $line; and not string match -q -r '^\s+$' -- $line
            set parent (echo $line | string replace -r '^\s*\d+\s+' '' | string replace -r ',.*' '')
            if string match -q -r '^\s{0,3}\d+.*?#' -- $line
                set child (echo $line | string replace -r '^\s*\d+\s+.*?, ' '')
                set has_entity true
            end
        end
        if string match -q -r '^\s{4,9}\d+.*$' -- $line
            set child (echo $line | string replace -r '^\s{4,9}\d+\s+' '')
            set has_entity true
        end
        if $has_entity
            echo $parent $child
        end
    end
end

function dany
    set fzf_preview_opts "--preview-window 'right:60%' --preview 'dedoc open $argv[1] {1} | bat --paging never --style='numbers' --color always -l $argv[2]'
        --bind ctrl-u:preview-half-page-up,ctrl-d:preview-half-page-down"
    set full_index (dedoc_parser "$argv[1]" "$argv[3]" | FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS=$fzf_preview_opts fzf)
    set index (echo $full_index | string replace -r ' #' '#')
    if test -n "$index"
        dedoc open "$argv[1]" $index | bat --paging always --style='numbers' -l "$argv[2]"
    end
end

And I have to provide a bash version of the script as otherwise, it would be unfair.

function dedoc_parser() {
    while IFS= read -r line; do
        has_entity=false
        if [[ "$line" =~ ^[[:space:]]{0,3}[0-9]+.*$ ]] && [[ ! "$line" =~ ^[[:space:]]+$ ]]; then
            parent=$(echo "$line" | sed -E 's/^[[:space:]]*[0-9]+[[:space:]]+//' | sed -E 's/,.*//')
            if [[ "$line" =~ ^[[:space:]]{0,3}[0-9]+.*## ]]; then
                child=$(echo "$line" | sed -E 's/^[[:space:]]*[0-9]+[[:space:]]+.*, //')
                has_entity=true
            fi
        fi

        if [[ "$line" =~ ^[[:space:]]{4,9}[0-9]+.*$ ]]; then
            child=$(echo "$line" | sed -E 's/^[[:space:]]{4,9}[0-9]+[[:space:]]+//')
            has_entity=true
        fi

        if $has_entity; then
            echo "$parent $child"
        fi
    done < <(dedoc search "$1" "$2" | sed 's/\n/\n/g')
}

function dany() {
    fzf_preview_opts="--preview-window 'right:60%' --preview 'dedoc open $1 {1} | bat --paging never --style='numbers' --color always -l $2' --bind ctrl-u:preview-half-page-up,ctrl-d:preview-half-page-down"
    full_index=$(dedoc_parser "$1" "$3" | FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS="$fzf_preview_opts" fzf)
    index=$(echo "$full_index" | sed -E 's/ #/#/')
    if [[ -n "$index" ]]; then
        dedoc open "$1" "$index" | bat --paging always --style='numbers' -l "$2"
    fi
}

dany function gets 3 arguments:

  • documentation - the name of the documentation you want to search in, whole list can be found using dedoc list.
  • language - the language of the documentation, it’s used for syntax highlighting. I’ve tried to use markdown but highlighting with specified language works much better as the documentation contains a lot of code.
  • query - the documentation you want to search for, if the query is empty, the fuzzy search will include all entities.

The script isn’t perfect, but it’s a good start. Maybe it would be better to add a mapping for all languages, but as I’m going to use the command through aliases, I didn’t do that.

Usage

Just add the script to the shell configuration file and reload the shell. Then you can use the dany function to search and open the documentation.

## this will open fuzzy finder with preview
dany python~3.10 python

## this first search for documentation using `dedoc` and then open fuzzy finder
dany python~3.10 python typing

In fuzzy search, you can use ctrl-u and ctrl-d to scroll the preview window.

The result should look like this: TUI

Aliases

To quickly search and open documentation, the following aliases can be added to the shell configuration file.

alias dpy='dany python~3.10 python'
alias dpy313='dany python~3.13 python'
alias dgo='dany go go'

So now you can just type dpy or dgo to search and open documentation.

Conclusion

It’s not the best solution, but it’s a solution. I hope that dedoc will be improved and will have more features in the future.