Offline documentation

I like to have documentation, manuals, wiki, examples and tutorials stored locally on my machine. It is great to use and can serve as a backup for future use.

My reasons

There are multiple reasons why I consider it a great thing:

1. It forces me to think about what I am actually searching for and to try multiple keywords with similar meaning or with something related.
2. While searching I learn much more than I originally intended since I often read more than just a single search result.
3. It reduces my reliance on the internet services which can become inaccessible at any moment for many reasons. These reasons are alo many, is short: dead project, dead domain, changed address, paywalled, firewalled (CloudFlare), censorship, etc.
4. Since I do not have to go on internet and interact with the mess out there it also protects me from nonsense written by modern people (I hope these creatures will not understand how to cripple my docs) or big corporations (AI buzzword nonsense).

In short I am more independent and disconnected from weird world.

Tools and approach

The short list of tools I use to search docs:

• man - Probably the most known program to display manuals
• info - I have no idea what is the point of this program, some stuff is here as well
• wikiman - With downloaded snapshot of ArchWiki, an awesome TUI program
• Various -h, --help program arguments
• Various docs installed from repositories which live in their own docs folders and are in most case html pages. I use Qt-docs like this, connected to my IDE KDevelop.
• Since I often write programs I also like to have examples for the use of some libraries which sometimes can be installed from the repositories and at other times I download the source code or the docs from their website. I try to get some offline version.

I am probably missing some program which would integrate all this together (maybe wikiman when configured properly?). I remember there was at least one, but the one I remember was some crazy GUI in which I got lost and I forgot it. So far I mostly search manually for what I need.

Closing thoughts

Utilizing local manuals is a bit harder than asking modern advertising engine to provide the link to most paying site with enough keywords. Yes, I worded it awkwardly since the search results often bring me to some variant of StackOverflow, distro-wiki page or some weird AI generated garbage.

It requires effort to be independent of modern way of doing things.