I don’t want to take away your fun on a side project, but if it were me, I’d use mix hex.docs fetch to cache all docs for my project’s deps locally, then run rg (ripgrep) in that directory for function names.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I do. I crafted a few very simple ripgrep regex-ish expressions and alias-ed them in my ~/.zshrc and then just do e.g. exdoc Enum.group_by in the terminal.

…Actually it might be time to extend that script to use open (Mac) / xdg-open (Linux) so as to just open the docs in a browser.

Yes, and you should blog it and/or gist it for sharing!

Yeah, probably before hitting 50 years old would be nice (currently 42).

TIL mix hex.docs fetch! It’s exactly what I was looking for!

But… it would be great to have something like mix hex.docs offline (without more args) that would open up aggregated docs for the dependencies of the current project. I was actually thinking about opening an issue on ExDoc to suggest something like that. Thoughts?

Like this:

 mix help hex.docs

                                  mix hex.docs                                  

Fetches or opens documentation of a package.

If no version is specified, defaults to version used in the current mix
project. If called outside of a mix project or the dependency is not used in
the current mix project, defaults to the latest version.

## Fetch documentation for all dependencies in the current mix project

    $ mix hex.docs fetch

## Fetch documentation for offline use

Fetches documentation for the specified package that you can later open with
mix hex.docs offline.

    $ mix hex.docs fetch PACKAGE [VERSION]

## Open a browser window with offline documentation

    $ mix hex.docs offline PACKAGE [VERSION]

## Open a browser window with online documentation

    $ mix hex.docs online PACKAGE [VERSION]

## Command line options

  • --module Some.Module - Open a specified module documentation page
    inside desired package
  • --organization ORGANIZATION - Set this for private packages belonging
    to an organization
  • --latest - Looks for the latest release of a package
  • --format epub - When opening documentation offline, use this flag to
    open the epub formatted version

Location: /home/developer/.mix/archives/hex-1.0.1/hex-1.0.1/ebin

Yes, but one that allows easy jumping between offline docs.

I believe dash can do hex docs.

I don’t mind. I thought about this approach, but it seems to me that the complexity outweighs the benefits here. btw i want the search to reflect the menu items and not just the functions, since guides and sections can be very useful. so it makes more sense to just parse the JSON that the sidebar is compiled of. No disk management, no grepping, no mistakes. Or is my logic flawed?

I’d love to see that too.

For Linux and Windows there’s also Zeal, but I couldn’t get used to the interface. Also there’s only one broken repo that transforms hexdocs into docsets, which Zeal needs, so only Elixir itself is supported.

I was toying yesterday with porting the code to a ex_doc formatter (similar to the epub one), so they could be generated directly with ex_doc and possibly hosted by hexdocs.