Documentation Conventions
Guiding Principles
Follow the Documentation Principles described by Write The Docs
In addition:
- We have gone to great lengths to retain compatibility with the standard library cmd, the documentation should make it easy for developers to understand how to move from cmd to cmd2, and what benefits that will provide
- We should provide both descriptive and reference documentation.
- API reference documentation should be generated from docstrings in the code
- Documentation should include rich hyperlinking to other areas of the documentation, and to the API reference
Style Checker
We strongly encourage all developers to use Prettier for formatting all Markdown and YAML files. The easiest way to do this is to integrated it with your IDE and configure your IDE to format on save. You can also install prettier
either using npm
or OS package manager such as brew
or apt
.
Naming Files
All source files in the documentation must:
- have all lower case file names
- if the name has multiple words, separate them with an underscore
- end in '.rst'
Indenting
In Markdown all indenting is significant. Use 4 spaces per indenting level.
Wrapping
Hard wrap all text so that line lengths are no greater than 120 characters. It makes everything easier when editing documentation, and has no impact on reading documentation because we render to html.
Titles and Headings
Reference the Markdown Basic Syntax for synatx basics or The Markdown Guide for a more complete reference.
Inline Code
Code blocks can be created in two ways:
- Indent the block - this will show as a monospace code block, but won't include highighting
- use the triple backticks followed by the code language, e.e.
python
and close with triple backticks
If you want to show non-Python code, like shell commands, then use a different language such as javascript
, shell
, json
, etc.
Links
See the Links Markdown syntax documentation.
API Documentation
The API documentation is mostly pulled from docstrings in the source code using the MkDocs mkdocstrings plugin.
When using mkdocstinrgs
, it must be preceded by a blank line before and after, i.e.:
Links to API Reference
To reference a method or function, do the following:
TODO: Figure out how to do this
Referencing cmd2
Whenever you reference cmd2
in the documentation, enclose it in backticks. This indicates to Markdown that this words represents code and will stand out when rendered as HTML.