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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

A few weeks ago I started unplugging my internet when I go to bed, so it's off when I wake up. Then I work for 2 or 3 hours before plugging it back in. I use DevDocs.io, which has an offline feature, to look up standard library stuff.

I actually delay going online for as long as possible because I know productivity will drop off a cliff once I reconnect.

This is the most productive I've been in my life, by quite a wide margin.

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For offline documentation, I use these in order of preference:

• Info¹ documentation, which I read directly in Emacs. (If you have ever used the terminal-based standalone “info” program, please try to forget all about it. Use Emacs to read Info documentation, and preferably use a graphical Emacs instead of a terminal-based one; Info documentation occasionally has images.)

• Gnome Devhelp².

• Zeal³, using up-to-date documentation dumps provided by Dash⁴.

• RFC archive⁵ dumps provided by the Debian “doc-rfc“ package⁶.

1. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/info/

2. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Devhelp

3. https://zealdocs.org/

4. https://kapeli.com/dash

5. https://www.rfc-editor.org/

6. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/doc-rfc

I found devdocs years ago but lost the link. THANK YOU for bringing it back to me

It's the top result on DDG and Google for [offline developer documentation].

The site preferences allow you to enable tracking which is disabled by default.

This checkbox is the single coolest thing I've ever seen on the Internet.

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