Ruby's official documentation just got a new look

It feels unfinished.

It doesn’t work very well on mobile. Though, I’m not sure that the old one did either.

There’s too much white space. Documentation should be compact so that you can fit as much as possible on the screen while remaining legible.

The colour.

Nothing like making green the primary color on your "Ruby" website and spending zero minutes checking it on mobile to notice that every page horizontally scrolls.

To everyone commenting about it being green: This isn't a new change, it's always been like that. https://web.archive.org/web/20141203122328/http://docs.ruby-...

If you thought it used to be red, you are probably thinking either of ruby-doc.org, which is an unofficial third-party site (but is older than docs.ruby-lang.org), or of the Rails docs.

Lots of (justified) negative observations. But I love the way the code looks (which, by far, is the most important thing for documentation of code).

Random example: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/ARGF.html#method-i-each

Love the new colour scheme, easy to read (on desktop) and feels more chill than reds and greys.

This seems to be a reskin of the prior RDoc styles, which are visible in prior Ruby versions (e.g https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.3/). Despite the rather bold green, the overall look of the primary content feels very subdued. I think a big part of it is how low-contrast the code blocks are. In the prior style, code blocks used a pretty high-contrast syntax highlighting scheme; comments were very distinct, which is important as these demonstrate return values. In the new style, it's quite difficult to distinguish comments (medium gray) from identifiers (dark gray).

Personally I prefer the look of rubyapi.org over either of the official ones, but this new one kinda feels like a step backward from the prior one.

I wouldn't mind if ruby copied the rails docs style exactly (https://api.rubyonrails.org/), and I'm pretty sure rails wouldn't mind either.

There are a lot of odd choices here. Is there a mailing list thread or something where this was worked out? I couldn't seem to find one on a quick scan, but I don't know where these discussions happen these days.

I really don't want to assume incompetence or ignorance at all since I'm sure someone worked really hard on this. But I'm genuinely puzzled by a lot of what's going on.

Accessibility-wise it has problems. Font-size, colour, contrast to name a few. And overuse of bold. When everything has emphasis, nothing does.

And green? How did that get approved?

I'm glad things are still moving in the Ruby community. I use it every day. But Elixir is winning the mind-share battle over Ruby at $dayjob these days. And their documents is second to none. One of the best that I've used.

What we really need is a common downloadable documentation format so that we can more easily build tools to read documentation of all languages and libraries in one place with unified interface, instead of jumping between tens of browser tabs each with a different (new) look.

I know there is devdocs [1], but unfortunately it need to implement scrapers and filters for each site specifically.

[1] https://devdocs.io/

> Ruby is an interpreted object-oriented programming language often used for web development.

Talk about irony. I increased the font to 150% so I could read that very sentence, and it's literally impossible to do so, because the sidebar covers the text when you zoom in that far. And the only reason I zoomed in that far was because they used Lato-light rather than Lato-regular. Maybe Ruby isn't used for accessible web development.

This either hasn’t been tested on a mobile device or the developer decided mobile devices weren’t important enough to properly support at launch. Bad look either way.

Oh no, much prefered the old look.

And why the hell green? Ruby's not Python :(

If I change the color hue of all the CSS variables from green to red, and make the text a bit darker and larger it's not so bad. With a light gray background on the sidebar to provide some contrast with the main content like the Rust doc does I quite like it.

I'll probably create custom CSS rules for the doc if this is the final version and be happy with it. I've been using a custom dark theme for HN for years and I'm happy with it. I'm glad we still have enough control over web pages to do that!

I like the new code blocks more! The syntax highlighting is more standard. I found the red comments on a grey background difficult to read in the old theme. However, I would still want to see higher contrast in the text.

It looks like the mobile view is getting fixed [1].

[1] https://github.com/ruby/rdoc/pull/1162

- Why is this dark green?

- Its very hard to navigate around and easy to get lost with links.

- Mobile view is borderline unusable. Need to scroll horizontally to read a sentence.

- Cursor is a beam while hovering over the sandwich menu icon

So what alternatives is there to the official docs?

ruby-docs.org is sadly gone https://web.archive.org/web/20230615061406/https://www.ruby-...

There is https://rubyapi.org and https://ruby-doc.org left from what I know

People not in the Ruby unity probably don’t realize Ruby takes a very liberal approach to its docs.

Most people just use rubyapi.org because it’s modern and looks good. It’s backed by the Ruby foundation.

These docs are just the “official docs” which I almost never even use anyways. Glad they don’t look like they’re from 2001 anymore but I’m likely to keep using rubyapi.org as it’s just way out ahead in looks and mobile support.

Why is it green? It shouldn't be green. Ruby docs should be red.

If i stumbled onto this site while looking for docs about a ruby method, i'd think I landed on the docs for some other programming language or fork of ruby. That's how off-brand this is - to the point of being disorienting as a user.

There are not a lot of things that create a brand around a programming language, and color is definitely one of them.

This is such a tasteless design decision for something meant to be official ruby documentation that I can't even appreciate any other changes that docs may introduce. And then the fact that it doesn't even work on mobile...

I am truly baffled anyone would think this is in good taste.

the last time I saw such a fumble with ruby related docs was back around 2014 when relishapp was the only place to get rspec docs. It's UX was such a painful mess that i just avoided it at all costs. Glad to see it's dead now.

The font is not good for my bad eyesight with severe astigmatism.

That's nice, but what I'd like is if I type the name of a major class, like "File", that the File class be on top, not some obscure method/module that contains "File" as a substring.

There is a lot wrong here. But my favorite messed up detail is how my cursor changes to text mode when I hover the hamburger button on the top left.

Two regressions I noted right away (chromium):

- CPU usage and rendering overhead/waiting time is noticably higher than on the old version.

- The supposedly responsive functionality means that the sidebar hides ~half of main content on my default window size and resolution on desktop. I have to zoom out to be able to read at all.

Sadly, the typography looks too neglected for the time when there is such an abundance of templates and fonts.

Here's a user stylesheet to make it slightly more readable:

  #root { color: black; }
  main { color: var(--text-color); }

Regular reminder to all designers that not everyone uses an Apple 50K Retina Ultra Whatever Display in a professionally lit studio apartment.

Not the best redesign, but probably the most upvotes and comments on a Ruby related post lately, so yay?

I remember this kind of UX being prevalent in the early 2010s or so. Fortunately most docs have moved on.

This reminds me of all the times a manager asked if I (backend dev) could 'just do a little interface for xyz'

Like what do you expect from me? I would be rendering these docs in a w3 emacs frame...

Is the font rendering any better on other platforms? On Windows it's so poorly hinted that the top and bottom of the lowercase 's' are disconnected

* Ugly font rendering * Underscores in page names * No 'next' and 'prev' buttons.

When that is done it should be a good start.

Don't like it, don't know what problems it was supposed to solve

Doesn’t work on mobile

- sent from my iPhone

Looks terrible. Very sad.

Up there with Tropicana and Gap for senseless rebrands

They should probably get idea from Laravel docs.

It's called Ruby, but the color theme is green.

Hilarious!

the font looks stuck at 99%

The main font color for Ruby is... green?

The vomit-green color is my favorite part. Like, they didn’t even try for a forest-green, or lime-green, nope. went straight for vomit

Big nope.

Not optimized for mobile in 2024, seriously?

No dark mode? Seriously?