π6

Searching in p6doc

2012-09-07

First of all, I would like to apologize for my rather weak English. It’s not my native language and I still learn it (but, my English is way better than two years ago, so I guess it’s good enough).

So, you may have heard about p6doc, the project which started 2 months ago. According to moritz, it’s intended to be comprehensive place where you can direct people to. It doesn’t yet describe everything (for example Str.indent wasn’t described when I’ve wrote this blog post), but it’s very likely that when you read this blog post it’s already described - everything is added to documentation rather quickly :-). And you can contribute it with ease, just modify a page and send pull request.

But, while the p6doc is already easy to use, finding stuff in it takes time, you have to type doc.perl6.org in your browser bar, press CTRL+F (well, I usually press dot, but this only works in Opera), type name of method and click the method. While it’s fast already, it could be faster.

Of course, there is perl6doc tool activated from command line, but currently it’s rather slow (according to time utility rendering Str.split took 4 seconds). But when Perl 6 implementations will improve their performance, it could be acceptable.

The problem is - HTML page requires effort of entering it and perl6doc is currently too slow to be acceptable for anything. But perhaps there is possibility of nicer way which would combine performance (as in, pages render nearly instantly) of HTML version and performance (as in, you can easily access it) of perl6doc tool.

Lately, I have contributed module for DuckDuckGo (if you aren’t using DuckDuckGo, why not?), to add search for Perl 6 documentation. It shortens the process of entering p6doc to simply typing “perl6 chomp” in search bar (and pressing enter). If this isn’t simple, than what is?

Try it at DuckDuckGo.

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