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As a developer, a considerable amount of my time is spent studying documentation. An excellent bigger period of time is spent discovering mentioned documentation. Or it was, till Sprint entered my life.
Sprint is an utility that manages self-contained documentation packages, known as docsets. You’ll discover docsets for nearly each language, library, framework, and content material administration system, and you may even import others to increase its library. By enabling and disabling docsets, you may tailor Sprint exactly to your wants.
Higher but, it shops all of this regionally so that you at all times have entry—good when engaged on planes, or when on a sluggish or flaky web connection.
Its highly effective search engine lets you discover precisely what you’re searching for inside seconds—begin typing and also you’ll see outcomes from all enabled docsets. You possibly can even constrain searches to a selected space of curiosity by prefixing your question with issues reminiscent of html:, css:, or sass:.
On the backside of the sidebar itemizing, there are useful hyperlinks to Google and Stack Overflow outcomes to your question—useful for these uncommon occasions when your search returns nothing within the documentation.
Sprint with buddies
Sprint by itself has confirmed to be an especially useful addition to my workflow, however when built-in with Alfred, the pace is unbelievable. Alfred is a productiveness app that quickens duties reminiscent of launching functions, discovering recordsdata, and operating scripts. Sprint comes bundled with an Alfred integration that may hopefully blow your thoughts prefer it did mine.
Reasonably than launching Sprint, clicking into the search bar and typing your question, merely pop open Alfred (together with your most well-liked key command—I exploit Choice + House), then start typing your search, prefixed with sprint. You’ll see an inventory of outcomes proper in Alfred; choose one and also you’ll be positioned proper at that time within the documentation inside Sprint. You possibly can constrain your question in simply the identical means as above—as an example sprint css:background.
Sadly, Sprint and Alfred are solely accessible on Mac OS X. In the event you’re on Home windows or Linux, it seems like Zeal is your alternative. I haven’t tried it myself, but it surely was impressed by Sprint, so it’s true to the spirit of pace and offline entry.
It could sound foolish and lazy, however the integration of Sprint and Alfred saves me tons of time on daily basis. Having the ability to leap from code, to documentation, and again into code with out my arms ever leaving the keyboard is a small, however significant enchancment.