I’ve always found it a bit inconvenient to have the scrolling panes at the top of the window when browsing the documentation on ruby-doc.org, especially when using my laptop’s built-in display instead of an external display. When using an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 16:10 (which is what I’m using most of the time) the limiting factor is height, not width, and the scrolling panes at the top of the window just make vertical space even more scarce.
What’s worse is the classes and methods lists are very long, and it’s difficult to use such a short scrolling window to find what you’re looking for. When scrolling through the list, I often fly right past the item I’m looking for.
The guys over at 37signals are doing it right with the Ruby on Rails documentation. By having the scrolling panes over on the left, they provide more space for the actual document to be displayed while at the same time allowing more items in the large lists to be displayed at once, thus dramatically decreasing search time.
To solve this problem, I created two small HTML files that I keep right on my desktop. One is for 1.8.6 core and the other for 1.8.7. Whenever I need to browse the Ruby docs, I just pop open a new tab in my browser window and drag one of these files in, depending on which one I need to browse. I found them to be very useful in my everyday workflow, so I thought I’d share them here.