Zeal, a developer documentation browser

Zeal 1
In the next article we are going to take a look at Zeal. This is a tool that will provide us with an offline documentation browser for software developers. Zeal is inspired by Dash, which is a commercial application developed especially for Mac OS.

Zeal provides documentation sets (docsets) for a large number of programming languages ​​and different software. You can read them all, online or by downloading the documentation to your team.

This will allow any developer to find everything they need without having to search Google or check the official documentation page. You just have to download the set of documentation that we want to use.

Zeal will take care of everything else. At the time that I am writing this article, there are 192 sets of useful documentation for all kinds of developers. You can consult the languages ​​available in the following screenshot.

Zeal 2
All those documents are generously provided by Dash. These documents are updated and maintained with great care. But if they do not finish convincing you, calm, you can also create yours.

Installation of Zeal in Ubuntu

Zeal is available in the default repositories of many Gnu / Linux distributions for free.
Thanks to this, we can install it using the default package managers of the corresponding distribution.
In Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and write in it:  

sudo apt install zeal

Zeal in the Ubuntu repositories, could be a little outdated.

If we are interested in using the latest version of this software, we can install it from the official repository:  

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zeal-developers/ppa  

sudo apt update && sudo apt install zeal

Use the Zeal

Zeal 3
We can launch Zeal from the menu or application launcher. Zeal's default interface can be seen in the following screenshot.

Zeal 4
As you can see, the interface is very simple. By default, Zeal does not come with any set of documents. We will need to download them.

Download the documentation

Zeal 5
To get the documentation, we can go to Tools → Docsets. There we will click on the 'Available' tab and choose the language that interests us to download your documents.

We just have to click on the Download button.

Zeal 6
Once the documents are downloaded, they will appear in the left panel of the home screen.

Now we can navigate through the documentation sets. In these documents we will be able to search for a specific string in a particular docset or in all docsets. Simply we will have to write the search terms in the option destined to it, located in the upper left corner to start searching.

For example, if we write the string 'while' in the search box, Zeal will provide us with the results of all document sets. In addition, we can limit the search within a specific docset. For example, php: while. This will only look for docsets related to php and the while loop.



Zeal 7

Use Zeal from the terminal

Not only can we use this software from the graphical interface. We will also have the possibility to launch a search from the command line. For example, if we execute the following command from the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) to search for 'is_single' using the Wordpress docset, which we previously downloaded, we will see something like the following:

Zeal 8  
zeal wordpress:is_single

The respective search string will be automatically opened in the GUI application. If the document for a specific search is not available, we can create it as described in this link or request one from the community.

Another notable feature of this software is a great integration with applications such as Atom, Emacs, Sublime Text, Vim, which will allow us to use add-ons to add this functionality to our editor. For example, to integrate Vim, we will install the Zeal for Vim add-on. We will be able to obtain all the available complements from the page of use of Zeal.

Uninstall Zeal

We will be able to eliminate this software from our team by typing in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) the following codes. To delete the repository we will write:

 sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:zeal-developers/ppa

To delete the program, in the same terminal we will write:  

sudo apt remove zeal && sudo apt autoremove

Zeal can be useful when you do not have access to the Internet and you have doubts in any development. We can now download all the documentation sets that interest us and learn from them without the need of these always connected to the internet.


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