An Introduction to Dash

I love how the Mac App Store has made the Mac software community feel more vibrant again, and made us aware of all the new software written by independent software vendors.

One such product is Dash, a documentation and snippet tool for developers.

Dash does two things: to organize and recall snippets (serving the same feature as BBEdit’s Clippings), and to look up documentation.

The latest version of Dash, version 1.6.1 adds a “dash://” URL scheme, which means we can use it with BBEdit’s Find In Reference functionality.

Dash’s documentation search feature lets you prefix your search with exactly which language you want to search for. So you might type: “python:email” and Dash will display the documentation for Python’s email module.

These prefixes are defined in Dash -> Preferences -> Docsets -> Enable Docsets

Coupled with BBEdit’s Find In Reference functionality, this makes a great tool for BBEdit.

Step by Step Guide to Using Dash with BBEdit

A lot of web developers use BBEdit, and the Javascript scene now-a-days is dominated by one framework: jQuery. So this article will use jQuery as an example, but I use Dash for my Cocoa, Python and Ruby documentation needs also.

First, make sure you have jQuery enabled in Dash (in the Enable Docsets preference screen I mentioned before), and the shortcut set to jquery:.

BBEdit lets you customize, on a language by language basis, what tool it uses to look up documentation. You do this in the BBEdit -> Preferences -> Languages panel. Use the + button to add a custom language preference for the language you want.

In the custom language screen, set the Reference Template URL to: dash://jquery:__SYMBOLNAME__.

Press OK, then test it out: go to (or make a new) window whose language is set to Javascript. Now select a jQuery function (click, for example) and Search -> Find In Reference.

Dash should come to the front with the documentation for your jQuery function in the search box.

Now, go forth and find things!

Dash is great, and a superfast tool for looking up documentation to a ton of common web frameworks. I’m very happy to have Dash as part of my toolchain.