Dash-style UX / merging doc sources

[ethchest]

Hi, I was glad to find quickdocs as is it similar especially to dash on the mac and because it had valadoc. However, I would like to ask what the plans are or what direction you want to take it. Specifically, I do not ge why there is such a distinction between valadoc and devdocs.
I know that elementary etc have emphasis on vala, but otherwise I think there is no reason for the distinction, especially considering general UX consideration it doesn't make any sense.
I think ideally the two should be merged. If you want a more prominent place for vala (or other docs of ones choosing) there could instead be an option to set docs in the 'selection bar' (where there now is valadoc and devdocs) or/and in general just improve the UX of the devdocs. If you need some UX inspiration: https://kapeli.com/dash
I am also trying to work with vala so I could also try to work on this if you would consider it.

[mdh34]

The main reason of the separation is because quickDocs is mainly just a wrapper around the devdocs and valadoc websites with a native interface and a few other things thrown in - at the core it's still just a WebKit browser. The Dash-style UX is really nice and I'm a big fan, but it would need quite a large rework in terms of parsing and presenting the doc sources, as well as things like search etc. which are currently implemented on the website side of things.

[ethchest]

Mmh, yeah I afterwards found out that devdocs is a separate website. I also discovered dasht - a terminal interface that uses the dash data and has parsing / search afaik. Not sure how feasible this is, but ideally you could use that as a backend, so you (or someone else) would 'just' have to do the gui.