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What do you use to read Erlang docs?

DevotionGeo

DevotionGeo

What do you use to read Erlang docs?

What do you people do for reading Erlang docs?
Is there something like Ruby’s ri?

I installed manual pages for Erlang under /usr/local/share/man and it works, but entering man erlang shows all the Built-In Functions as one long page and when I press tab after typing man erlang, it asks me if I want to list 22003 items. I don’t think it’s super useful. How do I filter things I need among these many items?

Compare it for example with git’s manual pages. When I press tab after typing man git, it asks me if I want to list 172 items, and when I say yes (press tab again), it shows all the useful things.
How do I use Erlang’s manual pages usefully like that?

10 comments
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Most Liked

Maartz

Maartz

Well as a macOS user, there’s an application which is very good for this and has a plugin with numerous IDE/Text editor: Dash.

Once you’ve downloaded the language doc, for some languages you got access to “docsets”, that’s the case for Elixir/Erlang.

CleanShot 2021-07-18 at 19.10.16
CleanShot 2021-07-18 at 19.10.16858×730 63.5 KB

It’s not terminal based, but once downloaded it’s ok to use offline, plus it updates automatically.

CleanShot 2021-07-18 at 19.12.10
CleanShot 2021-07-18 at 19.12.101367×935 79.5 KB

IDK if it’s okay to promote something like this here but, since it’s a tool, a cheap one furthermore, I guess there’s no problem.

5
Post #5
Maartz

Maartz

I almost forgot to talk about TL;DR, which is a nice terminal based tool, it’s FOSS so you can participate easily.
It’s, you named it, a shorter version of man.
Nice to quickly find something.

CleanShot 2021-07-19 at 08.51.45
CleanShot 2021-07-19 at 08.51.45896×371 29.7 KB
4
Post #6
DevotionGeo

DevotionGeo

Today I learned that man pages for Erlang are installed by default with the installation of Erlang. You don’t need to install man pages manually, but you need to access it through the erl command with -man flag instead of the man command, for example erl -man lists.
I wish to know how to list all the modules using erl -man command.

3
Post #7

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