Dash – Beautiful instant offline docs for almost everything

In my experience (using Zeal - which is the Linux QT port of Dash and uses the same repos) the docs generally seem to have some glaring oversights at the moment.

Possibly Zeal's search just isn't as good yet, but I had a heck of a time finding things about Python which are trivial to locate on the website through Google.

Speaking of: http://zealdocs.org/download.html

Dash-docs for Linux, PPA for Ubuntu/Mint available! It uses the exact same documentation sets and supports downloading in app.

I've enjoyed http://devdocs.io/ for the same purpose, though it doesn't have quite the same library.

What happened with this? https://twitter.com/wakaba_en/status/322751026211983360 https://dribbble.com/shots/1046492-Dash-app-replacement-icon

I travel a lot. And I'm thinking about buying a houseboat in France. I wish I'd seen this years ago. Happily purchased.

I can't believe this hasn't come up before - we had a big discussion about working offline on cruise ships and it wasn't mentioned. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6697787

Can't imagine life without this anymore. How it frees up the ~5 tabs of docs I used to have open in another window is worth it alone

For those of you on OSX, the integration with Alfred[0] is also stellar.

[0] - http://www.alfredapp.com/

For ppl living in emacs, there's a plugin that use dash docsets but don't require dash and it's quite integrated with emacs (helm).

They work in linux and windows.

BIAS ALERT: I'm coauthor of the plugin.

https://github.com/areina/helm-dash

The thing about Dash is that it's just so much faster at displaying documentation than going to the browser and doing a search query - I use it even when I'm online with Alfred integration.

Certanly a great investment.

I bought Dash a year ago. I've barely used it. My brain is wired to search on the web, not on Dash. The only times I've used it were when I had no internet connectivity, and it saved me.

Great product, it just doesn't fit into my routine.

Dash is great. The only reason I don't use it is that it offers only latest docset versions; once you update (in-app, great feature) the docsets, there is no way to access previous versions.

I would pay and use it immediately if I could access all versions (for example, Django 1.0 thru 1.7 etc)

Bought this a while back and was very impressed, definitely a worthwhile purchase if you ever spend some time without much internet access. The integration with Alfred + the fuzzy searching is just the icing on the cake.

Also as a little side note, I thought the way it handled the UI for tabs was interesting, though it does leave little room to grab the window and drag when you've got a few open.

OS X is surprising to me. This is something that should be cross platform.

Dash has been one of the most amazing tools to improve my day-to-day workflow. It's incredible.

I love to travel and specifically I love to travel to places that dont have wifi. Often times I take fly fishing trips to Montana, or shorter trips to the Smokey Mountains and during these times I need to be able to work an entire day without internet and Dash is the only reason I can do this effectively.

Dash + Alfred + Sublime are probably my most used tools in any given day (aside from Spotify which is rarely ever turned off)

I really like dash. It's also super easy to provide your own documentation. I've created a small python script for my software [1].

Here is the dash-feed: dash-feed://http%3A%2F%2Fspeedata.github.io%2Fpublisher%2Fspeedata_Publisher_(en).xml

[1] https://github.com/speedata/publisher/blob/develop/bin/creat...

Dash is great and a big shout-out to the developer (@kapeli) who is really responsive to support requests. I found that the backbone docset was actually using the Edge version not the latest stable release. He had it fixed in a few hours.

This has been the single best investment i've made to my workflow for years. Really communicative, friendly developer too.

For users other platforms there is Zeal which does almost the same (and also is free): http://zealdocs.org/

Just bought this recently. I feel that I got my money back with all the time won over Google searches multiple times already. The low latency and absence of unrelated results helps me stay in the flow. For me the trick was to assign a global shortcut to invoke the tool.

I like the idea, I bought it and have it open all the time, however I don't find myself using it that often. That's probably because I know most of the tools I work with out of memory (angularJS), and the documentation I do have to look up sometimes (UnderscoreJS) I actually prefer to see in the browser; the navigation on the browser version has a better subdivision in Underscore modules (functions, arrays, objects etc) which Dash's index is missing.

(subtle feature request: subcategories for the underscore docset, or headers/sections in the method listing)

Great developer too. I've put in docs request (for ColdFusion) and he constantly sought feedback from me to ensure it was presented in the best way possible and if he was unsure about something himself.

I was very happy to see this in HN. This is one of my favourite everyday job tools in my Mac. It's also easy to integrate with vim, emacs or sublime to show the docs for the selected keyword.

For a clojure programmer having clojuredocs docset is also a must (https://github.com/dlokesh/clojuredocs-docset) although I think this is unofficial.

Bought the license few weeks ago and loving it.

Would be willing to pay even more if it integrated well with ReadTheDocs — there are tons of (not only) Python docs living there which I need regularly.

And yes, I know #662 exists [1] on the RTD side and the future is not so clear.

[1] https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/issues/662

I've been using Dash for more than a year now. I love it. It is great for quickly looking up things, and best of all it works for multiple languages. I regularly write code in Clojure, Perl, Java and C, I also use Redis and PostgreSQL, and Dash helps with all of that.

My only wish is that someday I could get Intel's x86 manuals and ARM Cortex M0 and M4 instruction set documentation in Dash.

I love dash; I've been using it for years.

A small wishlist:

- ClojureDocs: http://clojuredocs.org/

- Hoogle integration: http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/

- BroPages: http://bropages.org/

I love Dash.

My one request. I wish that I could take my own HTML docs (WiiU Dev stuff, as example) and my own PDF's and get them into DASH for searching.

I have a fair amount of documentation in HTML that I would love to have all in one place along with the Docsets I use daily.

Definitely a requirement on the next non-Internet-accessible development opportunity!

I would like to see a utility that would collect (readability-ified) urls and package them nicely for Dash/Zeal. This would make it easy to build an ultra-custom collection of useful info - a searchable offline bookmarking tool. Best of all would be something that knew how to periodically refresh this archive.

Also, these tools should include a timeline tracking what was useful so that as I return to projects/problems I can scroll back and pick up where I left off.

Dash really is an indispensable developer's tool for OS X, but it took me a bit to integrate it into my work flow. Now I use it all the time, it's great.

This is pretty sweet. How do the docsets get prepped for download? The author scrapes the html doc pages at the tool's site? But for example in the case of Node.js, the menu nav on the left side of the official docs [0] aren't found in Dash's docset.

[0]http://nodejs.org/api/documentation.html

When the option to buy on the website or on the App Store is presented like this, which do the authors usually prefer?

Is there a way to tab into the content for a query (right side column) instead of having to mouseover and scroll? Also it would be nice to be able to search the content area as well so I can more effectively jump to the material I think I need.

Dash is beautiful because it doesn't get in your way. Very flexible, and even the most convoluted features are quite simple to configure.

My only wish is that it would let me use a 'night mode' so I can use white text on dark background at night.

I've really found this app incredibly helpful; I use a really wide variety of libraries and APIs and not having to go to each site has saved me tons of time. Maybe it's not for everyone, but I've loved it. Worth trying out.

Dash has become a part of my standard workflow in the last few months. It's great and it's always getting better. @kapeli responds quickly to feedback/questions on Twitter. I use it with Alfred and the vim plugin.

Wow, this is probably the most incredibly useful app for the Mac I've come across in a long time! The UI is seamless and well-made. I'm gonna love using this. :-)

Kudos HN, for bringing this app into the limelight!

Looks good, particularly alfred and sublime integration. It doesn't download any docsets for me on the OSX10.10 preview but I'll try it again when Yosemite is a bit more prepared for the real world!

Good stuff!

Dash is great combined with Alfred. I changed the keyword to a period (.) with no space so lookups look like ".extend" and bam I get the results for extend from four docsets.

This looks great, assuming it's very useful when you want to do concentrated coding with internet off to avoid distractions. I'm sold, buying this when I get out of work.

This is awesome. Although an excellent resource, there are many times I get very distracted using Google to get this kind of information. This could help me stay on task.

When Dash first came out, I liked it a lot, and found it better than Google for finding what I needed in almost any language I used.

But for some reason that even I don't really know, I stopped using it. I just checked the App Store on this computer, and it says Install, not Buy, which means I already paid for it long ago, and could have been using it this whole time. If only the developers could figure out why I stopped, they could probably make a lot more money.

That said, I do still see an App Store notification pop up every once in a while saying Dash needs to be updated, and it is pretty annoying how often that happens compared to any other app.

For python you can try a docsets collection of the most popular packages: http://python-dashapp.tk/

A great example of a purpose-built app which does one thing really well (i.e. searching docs from a single location). Easily beats having to google for docs.

I LOVE the integration: Alfred, PHPStorm, and Sublime. Brilliant. And frankly, I can't believe you have docs for things like Yii.

Easily worth the 19.99 price. Thanks.

Love Dash !! Esp. since you can also add Rubygems doc

I love Dash, have recommended it to everyone at uni. Using a machine where Alt+Space doesn't throw up documentation feels really weird.

Dash ramped up my programming game like nothing else. Pair it with the Dash Alfred workflow and you'll be flying. Highly recommended.

@kapeli : I am trying to buy Dash, but when I click the green "Purchase Dash" button, nothing happens. Is it normal?

Dash is the only app that's making me think twice about buying a Linux machine when my current laptop retires.

If this were integrated with an offline cache of StackOverflow questions that would be fantastically awesome.

I used Dash for a couple of months but found myself Googling when Dash returned no results.

Dash needs better fuzzy searching.

Is there an easy way to (try to) run Mac apps on Linux, like Wine project +PlayOnLinux for Windows?

It looks nice, I wish it were on windows as well (and linux while you're at it)

It is really annoying when these HN links are to Mac only applications.

I wonder how out of the question Spotlight integration would be.

This integrated with Alfred is a must-have dev tool IMO.

I have been using it for 6 months, love it.

Glad to see people providing offline documentation (and worrying about offline in general)

I am wondering why you went with a native app as opposed to something webbased though?

I like DevDocs better. I kind of find it shady that Dash is free and then suddenly, poof, you have to pay.

C#?

I love this! Thank you!

Call me stupid, but I can't get simple question answered by reading the page: What is Dash? A website? Locally run server listening at 8080? Desktop application? From the screenshots I guess it is probably OSX app, but is it so hard to put it clearly somewhere in the top?

I have no idea what this is as I am not a programmer, but the website looks really good

Didn't like it. Why use Dash if you have Google? But maybe I'm missing something. I'll try new version.

Nice advertising. It's a decent app that will hold you hostage for data unless you feed it 20 bucks. If they get a better(cheaper) financial model I could see myself doing it.