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13868 :: Nimrarian - generate Zeal Docsets from any Nim docs

• janAkali (orginal) [2026-04-19T15:32:35+02:00] view original

  This morning, I decided to update a 3-year-old Nim docset for Zeal (If you don't know - Zeal is a program for browsing documentation pages offline and Docset is the format it uses) as a small one hour project, or so I thought at the time.

  But I was too annoyed with few things:

  • The original Nim docset project used a nimscript that calls an unmaintained Go tool
  • The said Go tool is not flexible enough for the format of the Docset I want to create
  • Converting Nim Official Docs took an unreasonably long time on my machine (20+ minutes)

  After a couple iterations, I rewrited it all in Nim. The result is Nimrarian.

  Nimrarian is a CLI tool you can use to convert any Nim documentation (generated with --index:on) to a Docset for local browsing and search.

  Codeberg Repo: https://codeberg.org/janAkali/nimrarian

  Dependencies:

  • tinyre for regex
  • db_connector for sqlite DB (you might need to install a sqlite library if your system doesn't have it)

  You can install nimrarian with nimble:

  
  nimble install https://codeberg.org/janAkali/nimrarian
  Run

  Then generate documentation for your favorite Nim project:

  
  nim doc --project --index:on --outdir:docs someproject.nim
  Run

  And finally, generate the docset:

  
  nimrarian --outdir:$HOME/docsets --name:someproject --icon:icon.png docs
  Run

  This took much more than an hour, but now converting full Nim Documentation takes less than a second. I hope, it'll be useful to some of you.

  Oh, and I almost forgot, you can get the updated Docset file for Nim 2.2.8 from codeberg:janakali/nim-docset.

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• ingo (orginal) [2026-04-19T16:43:55+02:00] view original

  If you don't know - Zeal is a program for browsing documentation pages offline and Docset is the format it uses

  I don't know it. Is it possible to add remove library docs to/from it on installation/de-installation? In theory?

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• janAkali (orginal) [2026-04-19T17:38:00+02:00] view original

  I can't think of an easy way to do this. There's certainly no such functionality in the app.

  You would need to write a custom script/program to generate and cleanup docsets every time you run nimble or atlas (maybe using a thin async wrapper?).

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