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Comment by skovorodkin | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn't Nyxt have online documentation? I can only see an unstructured list of Articles, but no proper manual. Nyxt has some docs embedded in it, but it'd be nice to have it online, so users can read it from the comfort of the browser they've been using for years, playing with Nyxt in a window side-by-side.

And only after reading this paragraph at the _bottom_ of README.org on Github [1] I could find help in Nyxt:

> For full documentation about Nyxt, how it works, and how to extend it please see the embedded help. To get started, run the help command (C-space help).

Could you make it more obviuos? It would be great to have the tutorial [2] and the manual [3] in a readable form on your site.

[1] https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt#documentation--custom...

[2] https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/master/source/tu...

[3] https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/master/source/ma...

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That's a really good question, thank you for asking. The reason we why we've so far opted to not include documentation online (we used to have it online) was because it would drift from different versions people were using. Lots of times people would see a feature or something in the manual, and wonder why it didn't work on their own installation!

If you have any suggestions as to how to remedy this, or if you think the trade-off is not worth it, we are all ears!

How about a social login and storing preferred version and some sane defaults without login?

Thank you for listening!

I'm just telling you about my experience. Obviously Nyxt is very different from more conventional browsers. I'm an Emacs and StumpWM user, and I'd love to have the same kind of power in browser environment. But without easily accessible docs it's just a little bit too high barrier for me.

> it would drift from different versions people were using

Good point. Maybe as a first step just copy that paragraph from readme file to a more prominent place on site? It's very unusual for a project site to have no manual.

Then make the latest version of docs available online. It should be clear 1) what version it talks about, 2) how to check version of user's installation, and 3) how to open the embedded help.

Then if really needed add docs for previous versions, like some projects do. For instance https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/index.html.

I suppose at least some basic concepts have been stable enough to not change anytime soon?

Or does Nyxt still change substantially from the UX point of view?

Sorry for the delay in replying. I was going to reply the next morning, but then I forgot as I was quite sleepy!

We do have a page https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/documentation that basically lists the information. We used to retain that link, but found it unnecessary since now documentation is all built-in.

As Nyxt is quite young, it is still rapidly changing between releases (this does include the UX (as you've mentioned)).

For this reason we would need to provide versioned documentation. Perhaps we can generate versioned documentation from our CI. I will look into it. Thank you for brainstorming with me :-)

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