First a question, how do you go about looking up Rails or Gems API docs quickly while programming?
As a relatively new Ruby user I’ve just always assumed something was wrong with my Ruby installation because the following wouldn’t work: ri ActiveRecord::Base so I’ve always relied on running gem_server. Alas there is nothing wrong with my installation and it appears that gem_server is where it’s at. I just wish there were a gem_ri command! As it stands whenever I need a quick lookup I find myself firing up gem_server, pointing a browser at it, and clicking a handful of times because gem_server doesn’t allow searching. If I’m not traveling or disconnected I’ll use this site to do API lookups www.omara.ca/rails/ since it offers some degree of searchability, however, I would really prefer to use my local docs.
In the interim I’ve been using these solutions which help to a degree for machine local RDocs:
RImport allows you to import a gems rdocs into the ri data set with some caveats
The JEdit Ruby plugin has an integrated RDoc viewer that’s so so
Hopefully Radrails will eventually integrate a nice RDoc viewer that allows easy searching!