Some years ago I talked about Dash, which I’ve been using on and off since then. When I switched to a Linux distro I relied on dasht instead. It was a great replacement for the native macOS app – I didn’t bother trying Zeal at that time, and there was a handy Vim plugin as well.

Actually many LSPs are quite good at displaying documentation in the form of hover action. Below (left) is an example of Racket language server for the define form in Neovim:

It’s clear, you can enter the hover window and see what’s next. It’s exactly what’s being displayed by Dash. The same happens for Rust or R. Try it with Python or Haskell LSP, and you won’t get much more than a poorly formatted docstring or typing hint in many cases. I have a little snippet in my Neovim config that allows me to launch Dash instead of hovering the word under the cursor, which I mapped to gK:

command! Dash call Dash()
function! Dash() abort
  let filetypes = a:0 == 1 && a:1 == '!' ? [] : split(&filetype, '\.')
  execute "silent !" . 'open "dash://?query=' . join(filetypes) . ':' . expand('<cword>') . '"'
endfunction

Yes, I know, it’s pure Vim script, not Lua.¹ Should I prefer to read a plain text version of the same docset, I can <leader>K to get the same information via dasht. I’m okay with using mostly terminal-based utilities, but I find that well-designed GUIs are equally good sometimes. Maybe I found myself at home with macOS again, at least I’m more at ease with GUIs than I used to be on Linux or on Mojave.

I hate that I need to buy an annual license (I had a perpetual license for an older version which is no longer available) because I don’t like this pricing business model, so I’ll see how it goes for the year to come. If I don’t want to renew my license, I know I will be able to access my offline docs with dasht.