Is there something like a friendlier version of the Erlang docs?

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Since I first started experimenting with Elixir I see myself digging slowly to discover more about how powerful Erlang is…Besides that, @josevalim went on Twitter the other day to talk about how dependencies are your responsibility and this got me wondering how much more from OTP I could be utilizing in my code without resorting to “external” dependencies (which I’m making a distinction here).

So I’ve been browsing Erlang Docs now and then and I have to say: from my perspective, the way things are documented in the Elixir realm has spoiled me too much :grimacing:…

I don’t know if it’s just me that cares about that, but Erlang’s documentation does not strike me as the most effective nor user-friendly of all. I also don’t know if part of this is because I haven’t got the opportunity to actually study more about Erlang itself, so everything looks extra-weird in my eyes (somewhat hard to read).

So, I was wondering if there’s some kind of initiative to “modernize” Erlang’s documentation. Or someplace else that presents things in a more friendly manner.

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Yes, EEP 48 and there is more coming.

About viewing Erlang docs - either use the one with search, or check documentation browsers like Dash or devdocs.io, it will make it much easier to search through documentation.

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Hi @hauleth, thanks for your reply!

I just finished reading the EEP and it seems quite interesting. Where can I check more information about that? Do you know if this work is being coordinated yet? The RFC status is “draft”, but I found old PRs in the Elixir repo talking about this subject.

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Do you have a link to the Erlang docs with search? I’m not sure that I’ve seen that before.

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How about: Erlang Documentation Search ?

or https://erldocs.com/?

or https://erlang.org/doc/pdf/otp-system-documentation.pdf and use pdf search tools? This is not the best but the table of contents itself is pretty good and usually directs me to the correct place (might be I have too much assumed knowledge)

And then of course erl -man <module> if you know what module you are after. Use a pager you a familiar with and use the search capabilities of the pager.

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Thanks for those links, I’ll bookmark them :+1:

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Yes, EEP 48 is already implemented for OTP (as of OTP 23) and OTP 24 will support it for external modules as well. @josevalim has draft of the EEP to add -doc/-moduledoc/etc. module attributes to Erlang that would replace doc comments of EDoc. There are already some preview implementations of documentation generators that produce ExDoc-like HTMLs for Erlang if these have EEP 48 Docs chunks.

All of above is coordinated by EEF B&P WG.