Languages and offline docs

Elide prints its messages and its built-in documentation in your language, and the whole manual ships inside the binary, so elide help works without a network connection.

Languages

A message or page without a translation appears in English. Output from your own programs is never changed.

Choose a language

Elide uses the first of these that names a language it has:

1. The --locale flag, on any command.
2. The ELIDE_LOCALE environment variable.
3. LANGUAGE (a colon-separated list), then LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES and LANG.
4. The operating system’s language settings.
5. English.

On Windows, Elide reads the system language instead of LANGUAGE, LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES and LANG.

elide --locale fr --help
ELIDE_LOCALE=de elide build
LANG=uk_UA.UTF-8 elide help
LANGUAGE=ja:es elide --help   # no Japanese, so Spanish

Tags take any common form: fr, fr-FR, fr_FR and fr_FR.UTF-8 all select French. C and POSIX are skipped.

Read the docs offline

Every page in this site’s navigation is built into the elide binary, in each elide help language.

elide help                       # browse and search in the terminal
elide help installation          # open a page by slug or title
elide help run                   # a command's reference
elide help --lang de projects    # one page in another language
elide help --languages           # list the languages

--lang changes the language of the docs only; --locale changes every message. Each page on this site shows the elide help command that opens it, under Read offline.

In a pipe, a script or an agent, elide help prints Markdown instead of opening the browser. Force it with --format markdown:

elide help --format markdown                         # every page, as an index
elide help --format markdown tooling-dependencies > deps.md
elide agent help http-service                        # the same, for agents

The keys of the terminal browser are listed under elide help.

On the web

elide.help is published in English, Español, Deutsch, Français, Русский, Українська and العربية. Pick a language from the language menu in the header; English pages at /docs/… live at /fr/docs/…, /de/docs/… and so on in other languages, and Arabic pages read right to left. When your browser prefers a published language, English pages offer a one-line link to it; the site never redirects you. A page without a translation shows the English text.

Agents and scripts read any page as Markdown by appending .md to its URL; see /developers.