JDK API Documentation

One of the minor irritants I face while programming in Java under Linux is that there is no ready equivalent of the JDK API documentation in WinHelp format that comes in so handy while looking up a method or class. The normal HTML format JavaDocs is rather painful for such tasks.


One of the options is to use either xCHM or GnoCHM with the same CHM file that I use under Windows. However the former needs wxWidgets and the latter needs GNOME, neither of which I want to install on my PC. Besides this, I do not want to support a closed-format document format that people are struggling to understand.


It seems that there is a Java-based solution called JHelpViewer to help out with this situation and my limited testing with it indicates that it is decent and does the job to a fair extent. However, I do not like the overhead of keeping a JVM instance running on my PC just to view JavaDocs. I think a better option would be to use something like Gtk2 instead.


Does no one else find it weird that Sun does not itself ship the JDK API documentation in the JavaHelp format?


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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