Devhelp

Description

Devhelp is a developer tool for browsing and searching API documentation. It provides an easy way to navigate through libraries and to search by function, struct, or macro.

The documentation must be installed locally, so an internet connection is not needed to use Devhelp.

Devhelp works natively with the documentation generators used by the GNOME project libraries. Other development platforms can be supported as well, as long as the API documentation is available in HTML and a *.devhelp2 index file is generated.

Devhelp integrates with other applications such as Glade, Builder or Anjuta, and plugins are available for different text editors (gedit, Vim, Emacs, Geany, …).

Installation of the Devhelp Flatpak

• Devhelp on Flathub

How to contribute

See the contribution guide.

Dependencies

• GLib
• GTK
• WebKitGTK
• gsettings-desktop-schemas

Integration with other developer tools

Devhelp provides some command line options, such as --search and --search-assistant. A text editor plugin can for example launch the command devhelp --search function_name when a keyboard shortcut is pressed, with the function_name under the cursor.

Devhelp also provides a shared library, to integrate the GTK widgets inside an IDE. It is used for example by Builder and Anjuta.

For the --search command line option, see the class description of DhKeywordModel, the search string supports additional features useful for IDEs or other developer tools.

Other documentation

• There is user documentation written in the Mallard format in the help/C/ directory. You can open that documentation with the yelp help/C/ command, or pressing F1 in the Devhelp application.

• There is an API reference manual for the libdevhelp that can be built with GTK-Doc, see the gtk_doc build option.

Default development branch

The default development branch of Devhelp has been renamed to main. If you have just cloned the Devhelp repository, you don't need to change anything. If you have an older local checkout, you can use these commands to switch from the old default branch name to the new one:

git switch master
git branch -m master main
git fetch
git branch --unset-upstream
git branch -u origin/main
git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD refs/remotes/origin/main