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Daily Life with the Offline Laptop

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Re: Daily Life with the Offline Laptop

#3
I like working offline and do it frequently. In fact, if I would just turn off my tethered 4G right now, I would get a lot more done and be much happier with myself. Will be doing just after I finish typing this :-). Because I use my computer primarily for programming, the biggest thing I need are docs. In that respect, I've found that working with Rust is amazing. Installing all the normal documentation you need and then going offline is so incredibly easy. Anyway, massive shout out to anyone that pushed to make that dream a reality!

Re: Daily Life with the Offline Laptop

#4

No affiliation, but I found Dash incredibly helpful for working offline: https://kapeli.com/dash . You can download the docs for most languages/frameworks AND you can download Stackoverflow by section in a way you can read and search.

Pity it's mac only

Re: Daily Life with the Offline Laptop

#5
There was a time when I had a computer that didn't have a working network card. I would take it to the library with me, and I would be incredibly productive during it. If I got stuck on something, I'd work on something else instead, and look it up when I got home.

I also tried doing what I called an "Internet Diet", of self-imposing working offline, and as long as I stuck with it I got a good amount done then also. In fact one thing I noticed was that if I didn't let myself have the internet, I'd start to get bored, and would naturally open up a code editor or text editor and start writing, or at least organizing the files on my hard drive or even just reading a book.

My main problem are my jobs, though. If my job absolutely requires the internet in order for me to do my job (and right now it absolutely does), then the distractions are just a few clicks away, tempting me, and I fall into its trap.

Time to get off the internet, at least for a bit.

Re: Daily Life with the Offline Laptop

#6
post #4

No affiliation, but I found Dash incredibly helpful for working offline: https://kapeli.com/dash . You can download the docs for most languages/frameworks AND you can download Stackoverflow by section in a way you can read and search.

Pity it's mac only

Check out Zeal, which piggybacks on Dash for Linux and Windows: https://zealdocs.org/

Re: Daily Life with the Offline Laptop

#7

No affiliation, but I found Dash incredibly helpful for working offline: https://kapeli.com/dash . You can download the docs for most languages/frameworks AND you can download Stackoverflow by section in a way you can read and search.

Dash is awesome, and even more so when you use the Alfred integrations to get essentially a system-wide hotkey for doc search. Alfred hotkey, docset abbreviation you set, search string, and you're there.

Re: Daily Life with the Offline Laptop

#8

I like working offline and do it frequently. In fact, if I would just turn off my tethered 4G right now, I would get a lot more done and be much happier with myself. Will be doing just after I finish typing this :-). Because I use my computer primarily for programming, the biggest thing I need are docs. In that respect, I've found that working with Rust is amazing. Installing all the normal documentation you need and…

I use a tool called Zeal on linux which makes using docs even better than in a browser since its pretty much instant.

Re: Daily Life with the Offline Laptop

#9
much respect for keeping a PowerBook in use! I keep my 12" PowerBook around for similar uses: Music (iTunes), email (Mail), writing (TextEdit), development (also TextEdit haha). Amazingly TenFourFox (Firefox fork) is still being maintained! It's impossibly slow but that can also be an advantage. I'm still thinking about that post recently where someone said they add a few seconds to a page load. Well, an easy way to do that is to just use old hardware! It's nice to have the internet if you need it, but it's slow enough to not be addictive...

Re: Daily Life with the Offline Laptop

#10

I like working offline and do it frequently. In fact, if I would just turn off my tethered 4G right now, I would get a lot more done and be much happier with myself. Will be doing just after I finish typing this :-). Because I use my computer primarily for programming, the biggest thing I need are docs. In that respect, I've found that working with Rust is amazing. Installing all the normal documentation you need and…

I use a tool called Zeal on linux which makes using docs even better than in a browser since its pretty much instant.

I have used this in the past with Ruby. I liked it well enough, but I was frustrated trying to get the right versions of things (I world on some older code bases -- including Ruby 1.8 :-P ). Getting all the ri docs for things that are 10 or more years old is incredibly painful. I could potentially build them myself, but that is also surprisingly painful.

The thing I like about Rust's setup is that things just work out of the box. `rustup doc` opens a page containing the Rust book, Rust by example book, all of the API documentation and more -- all for the version of Rust that I currently have installed. `cargo doc` builds all of the documentation for all of the crates that I am using in my current project. All of the documentation is for the versions of the crates I'm using. It's just very seemless.

The really cool part of the Rust docs is that all of the API documentation (and crate documentation) has links to the source code. So if I can't understand what the documentation is saying, I can read the code. It's incredibly helpful. I must use that feature 5 or 6 times a day.

But, yeah, Zeal is quite useful and I really should set it up again for my Ruby stuff.

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