rustdoc-text

A lightweight library and CLI tool to view Rust documentation as plain text (Markdown) in the terminal.

Similar to tools like pydoc and godoc, but for Rust documentation.

Features

• View documentation for any Rust crate directly in your terminal as Markdown
• Access documentation locally (builds as needed) or from docs.rs
• Lightweight and fast with minimal dependencies
• Simple command-line interface
• Can be used as a library in your Rust code

Installation

cargo install rustdoc-text

Command-line Usage

• Usage note: --online is recommended!

# View documentation for a crate
rustdoc-text serde

# View documentation from docs.rs (instead of building locally)
rustdoc-text --online tokio

# View documentation for a specific item in a crate
rustdoc-text serde Deserializer

# View documentation for a specific sub-item in a crate
rustdoc-text --online ropey struct.Rope

# Get help
rustdoc-text --help

If you're not getting the particular URL resolved that you want, read the source here to see how it is being converted from your input.

Library Usage

use rustdoc_text::Config;
use anyhow::Result;

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    // Simple usage
    let docs = Config::new("serde")
        .with_online(true)
        .execute()?;

    println!("{}", docs);

    // Or use the functions directly
    let tokio_docs = rustdoc_text::fetch_online_docs("tokio", Some("Runtime"))?;
    println!("{}", tokio_docs);

    Ok(())
}

How it works

This tool:

1. Fetches Rust documentation (either by building locally or from docs.rs)
2. Extracts the main content section from the HTML
3. Converts the HTML to Markdown using the htmd library
4. Outputs clean, readable Markdown to stdout

Why Markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that's very readable as plain text, making it ideal for terminal output. It preserves the structure of the documentation while being much more readable than raw HTML.

Dependencies

• htmd: For HTML to Markdown conversion
• clap: For command-line argument parsing
• reqwest: For fetching online documentation
• anyhow: For error handling
• scraper: For HTML parsing

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.