My sincere thanks to Dash for sponsoring my writing this week. It’s a particular pleasure for my first sponsor to be an app that I’ve personally used for years. Accordingly, these are all my own words.
Dash is a documentation browser for more than 130 API documentation sets, naturally including the iOS and OS X SDKs, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, Ruby, Python and dozens more. It covers web frameworks, templating and scripting languages, and everything from SASS to LaTeX. All the documentation sets are stored locally, for instant access no matter whether you’re online or not, or how fast your internet connection is.
There are two main reasons I began using Dash over Xcode’s built-in documentation viewer (and I still do, for my web work on this blog, shell scripting, and as a Markdown and regular expressions reference).
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It has excellent support for keyboard-navigation (I hate clicking around).
Dash provides instant fuzzy search of all your docsets (and yes, “nsas” will find “NSAttributedString”), and find-in-page is a simple matter of hitting space and continuing typing. You’ll never have to press the Tab key.
You can move between results, switch which docsets you’re searching on the fly, and independently scroll the results list and current documentation page – all without taking your hands from the keyboard, or ever taking the focus from the search field. For me, that was the killer feature. Dash also supports global hotkeys for triggering a search, with or without the selected text.
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It integrates with every conceivable utility, editor and IDE: Alfred, Quicksilver, LaunchBar, Xcode, Eclipse, AppCode, BBEdit, TextMate, Coda… the list goes on – and includes the shell, Vim and Emacs.
It also provides a System Service and URL scheme, letting you initiate queries from pretty much anywhere.
Dash even pulls in Stack Overflow and Google results for your query, if you wish. In the event that your preferred documentation isn’t already available (pretty unlikely – there are over 130 docsets), you can make your own too, from AppleDoc, Doxygen, RDoc, Javadoc, Python and several other documentation formats.
Lastly, a feature I regularly appreciate are Dash’s “cheat sheets”, which are searchable and easy-to-read summaries of various languages and technologies. I currently keep them handy for Git commands, regular expressions syntax, and HTML entities – but plenty more are available.
It’s a pleasure to recommend Dash to you, as an actual user of the app. I’m grateful for the sponsorship, and the free rein in writing about the product here.
Find out more about Dash at kapeli.com, and you can also contact Kapeli on Twitter.
If you’re interested in sponsoring my writing for a week, and reaching my audience of tech-savvy, curious, creative thinkers, you can find more information here.