In this post I just want to bring to your attention a little plugin I extracted from my vimfiles. We all need to read some API docs during our work day. And I dislike a lot the idea of opening the browser, going to a website, typing something in (very often just a single word) and waiting for the result. So I started to search for something better and I found apidock.vim that does a good job. I wrote something very similar to the plugin for my vimfiles because the plugin itself didn’t fit my needs very well.
Well, I was quite happy with the result. Finally I got something I liked about doc browsing and Vim. I just had to type a particular mapping and voilà suddenly I was reading the doc I was looking for.
So, just a couple of days ago, I found out that
api.jquery.com has a very nice feature. In fact, if
you go to http://api.jquery.com/each it just
works fine. It works fine even if you go to
http://api.jquery.com/ea. I searched for a plugin
similar to what I had in my vimfiles and didn’t find anything, so I decided I
could have created it. And here we are. It’s a very small plugin, you can find
it here. When your cursor is on
a jQuery method, type JJ and the plugin will open a new tab in your browser
(or a new instance of the browser) to the related docs.
After writing the jQuery plugin, I thought it would be very simple to create a tiny and flexible plugin for Ruby, RSpec and Rails. Yesterday I released vim-ruby-doc. It works in the same manner as vim-jquery-doc does. When your cursor is on something you would look up on apidock.com, type:
RBfor RubyRSfor RSpecRRfor Rails
and the plugin will open a new tab in your browser (or a new instance of the browser) to the related docs. Obviously, I added options to both the plugin, in case you need other mappings or another command. Check out the README for further information.
I hope you can find it useful. Actually, I use it all the time and I’m asking myself what I can do to improve it. Maybe you have some ideas.