rustdoc-text is both an executable binary that can be run, and a library that can be used in Rust programs.

Installing the command-line executable

Assuming you have Rust/Cargo installed, run this command in a terminal:

cargo install rustdoc-text

It will make the rustdoc-text command available in your PATH if you've allowed the PATH to be modified when installing Rust. cargo uninstall rustdoc-text uninstalls.

Adding `rustdoc_text` library as a dependency

Run this command in a terminal, in your project's directory:

cargo add rustdoc-text

To add it manually, edit your project's Cargo.toml file and add to the [dependencies] section:

rustdoc-text = "0.3.3"

The rustdoc_text library will be automatically available globally. Read the rustdoc_text library documentation.

Back to the crate overview.

Readme

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:

Fetches Rust documentation (either by building locally or from docs.rs)
Extracts the main content section from the HTML
Converts the HTML to Markdown using the htmd library
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.

Installing the command-line executable

Adding rustdoc_text library as a dependency

Adding `rustdoc_text` library as a dependency