Tag: offline

Offline documentation with Zeal and Sublime Text

Zeal - a documentation browser
Zeal – a documentation browser

Yesterday I came across a really useful application for web development which has already sped up my workflow when needing to look for documentation: Zeal.

The efficiencies come about mostly because instead of having to open up a new browser tab, then either search or navigate to any documentation bookmarks you may have saved, you can instead search (or browse) within the official documentation which has been downloaded to Zeal.

Download documentation sets

Inspired by the Mac-only application Dash, Zeal is a simple offline API documentation browser.

In other words, select the languages you want documentation for, click download and it’s all available in one easy-to-search location.

Select which documentation sets (docsets) you want and click Download
Select which documentation sets (docsets) you want and click download.

You can either browse the documentation, or simply search.

By default searching returns results from all documentation downloaded, but you can also prefix your search terms with the name of a particular language followed by a colon should you wish to limit the search to only that language or framework, e.g. wordpress: get_header.

In order to install it you first have to unzip the application files to your C:\Program Files directory, or C:\Program Files (x86)\ for Windows 64-bit, and create your own shortcut—there isn’t an automatic installer.

Sublime Text integration

Where I’m finding it particularly useful is within my coding editor Sublime Text, using the Zeal Sublime Text package (available for both Sublime Text 2 and 3) which allows you to search the documentation from within Sublime Text, without lifting your fingers from the keyboard.

I found that to configure it I had to first install the package (using Will Bond’s excellent package control), then run it by pressing Shift+F1 which returns an error, and then locate the Zeal.sublime-settings file (via Preferences > Browse Packages…) and update the “zeal_command” parameter to wherever you unzipped the zeal.exe file, which for me looks like:

"zeal_command": "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Zeal\\zeal.exe",

Then in Sublime Text itself I have two options:

  1. Select something to look up and hit F1.
  2. Or press Shift+F1 to open the Zeal search box to type in my search term.

As an example, I’ve just highlighted padding-left in my CSS code and pressed F1.

Highlight a keyword press F1 and Sublime Text sends that plus its context (a CSS file) to Zeal
Highlight a keyword press F1 and Sublime Text sends that plus its context (a CSS file) to Zeal

You will notice that the Sublime Text plugin has also respected the search term’s context, within a CSS file, and passed that too as an argument.

I’m really impressed and thoroughly recommend you check it out if you are involved in any kind of coding. Both Dash and Zeal share the same documentation sets. There are a lot! And it can also be integrated into a lot of editors, not just Sublime Text, such as Coda, TextMate, Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, and PhpStorm.