How is this better than ri?

[Nakilon]

Considering this:

Motivation

I'm trying to depend less on software with GUI, instead using software that could be used through console

[skatkov]

@Nakilon This question probably belongs more in discussions. :)

But I will attempt to answer as good as possible, please consider that this is my opinion, if ri is good enough for you—then that's great. But I tried ri and pry-doc before starting this project and I was very frustrated with experience.

These are the issue from my memory, they might not be up-to-date right now or I could be forgetting something:

• ri worked pretty stably for me for anything related to stdlib, but I had issues picking up gem docs with it.
• for gems, I had to use pry-docs, but it worked for me only if 'pry-doc' gem was part of a bundle. But somehow pry-doc had issues picking up stdlib classes.
• it took quite a lot of time and space to generate documentation for ri to use. In some cases, I had to modify .gemrc to include docs for gems and I haven't found a way to do so selectively for gems.
• search had a lot of feature to be desired -- only class/method names could be used, fuzzy matching was not great, description was not indexed.
• Readability of documentation could be improved

I decided to build this gem to generate "markdown and search index". In my mind, this approach seems easier:

• markdown is well-supported by other software, It already works with software like glow.
• CSS styling could be applied to improve readability.
• Markdown could be distributed to any device, that doesn't have ruby on it. I could potentially even ssh into a server to review documentation (or have a wearable device with access to docs)

I'm also building a TUI client on top of this library—I call it posh . I plan to solve all the issues I had with ri and pry-doc with this combo.

[Nakilon]

Thanks for the explanation! P.S.: there is no Discussions tab: