Using Mac OS X as my primary development platform is great since I can emulate my LAMP production environment a lot closely than I ever could developing on Windows.  One thing I missed for a while is being able to load the CHM (Compiled Help format used on Windows) manuals for PHP and MySQL quickly and easily (especially for those great disconnected development sessions while traveling when looking at the online documentation is not an option).

However, today I finally went searching and discovered several CHM viewers for Mac OS X.

Chmox does a pretty decent job, but the search function wasn’t working for me.

Another option is xCHM with a Mac OS X version available on VersionTracker.  It has the Search functionality and looks pretty much like the Windows CHM Viewer, but is slower and for some really bizarre reason, xCHM only lets you load a single CHM file at a time.

iCHM is a an all-around good app, and has a pretty nice tabbed viewing feature, but didn’t seem to be compabile with PHP’s CHM manual (the searching didn’t work) – worked fine with the MySQL CHM manual though.

Finally, there’s ArCHMock which is fast, has a decent search function, and seems to be the winner at least for my needs.

Now I have my CHM files happily sitting on the desktop.  The trip home for Thanksgiving will now be productive, unless the train is so packed that I don’t have room to take out my laptop. :-/

Tags: chm, mac os x, manuals

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 9:46 pm and is filed under PHP, Software Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.