Help:Browsing

From ArchWiki
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

The official MediaWiki instance of the ArchWiki can be accessed online at https://wiki.archlinux.org with any web browser.

Note that some translations are hosted externally under different domain names, see Help:i18n#Languages.

Searching

Tango-view-fullscreen.pngThis article or section needs expansion.Tango-view-fullscreen.png

Reason: Describe the internal search engine, including searching for exact phrases. (Discuss in Help talk:Browsing)

MediaWiki supports full text search, see the search box at the top of the page. The limitations of this feature is that it indexes only words longer than 3 characters. If you want to search for shorter words (1 to 3 characters) then a known workaround is to use Google's sitesearch feature. Enter your search items in the form and it will automatically search within ArchWiki.

Of course, you can do the same manually by appending site:wiki.archlinux.org to Google searches:

your search terms site:wiki.archlinux.org

This works fine, but it is not live. Google is indexing the ArchWiki every 1 to 3 days.

DuckDuckGo Bangs

You can also use DuckDuckGo's bangs feature to directly search the Arch Wiki. After adding DuckDuckGo as the default search engine of your web browser, you can directly type something like the following in the omnibox / URL bar:

!archwiki your search terms

or, shorter

!aw your search terms

Finding related articles

Every article on the ArchWiki is categorized. The categories of a page are displayed at its end. For example this page is categorized with Category:Help. You can view the category hierarchy at the Table of contents.

Additionally many articles directly link to related articles with a Related articles box at the top of the article.

Offline viewing

  • arch-wiki-docs — Pages from ArchWiki optimized for offline browsing.
https://github.com/lahwaacz/arch-wiki-docs || arch-wiki-docs
  • arch-wiki-lite — Arch-wiki-lite is designed to offer the smoothest possible experience for the poor person stuck without internet access or any way of starting a graphical web browser.
http://kmkeen.com/arch-wiki-lite/ || arch-wiki-lite
  • arch-wiki-man — The ArchWiki easily accessible and searchable as man pages.
https://github.com/greg-js/arch-wiki-man || arch-wiki-manAUR
  • wikiman — Offline search engine for manual pages, Arch Wiki, Gentoo Wiki and other documentation.
https://github.com/filiparag/wikiman || wikimanAUR

Alternative online viewers

  • Wikicurses — A simple curses interface for MediaWiki sites such as ArchWiki or Wikipedia.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=187864 || wikicurses, wikicurses-gitAUR
Tip: For Android there is ArchWiki Viewer for Android, a simple viewer for the online ArchWiki. Page formatting is optimized for mobile viewing.