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# Help:Browsing

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From ArchWiki

Related articles

- Help:Reading

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

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: Describe the internal search engine, including searching for exact phrases and the effect of redirects. (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), 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 indexes the ArchWiki every 1 to 3 days.

### Search engine bangs

Many search engines like Searx, DuckDuckGo, and others offer "search bang" feature to directly search the ArchWiki. After adding a supporting search engine as the default search engine of your web browser, you can directly type a query like this in your URL bar:

    !archwiki your search terms

or, shorter

    !aw your search terms

### Search engine shortcuts for Chromium-based browsers

1. Type in `chrome://settings/searchEngines` into the address bar. Click on "Add" under "Site search". Change `chrome://` to your browser accordingly.
2. In the "Search engines" field, name this entry, e.g. "ArchWiki".
3. In the "Shortcut" field, type the text that will trigger this search engine in the address bar e.g. `!aw`
4. In the "URL with %s in place of query" field enter `https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Special:Search/%s` as the URL.
5. Click the "Add" button. The address bar shortcut is now active.

## Finding related articles

Every article on the ArchWiki is categorized. The categories of a page are displayed at the top. 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 can be downloaded for convenient offline use.

### Packages

- arch-wiki-docs — Pages from ArchWiki optimized for offline browsing.

  https://github.com/lahwaacz/arch-wiki-docs || arch-wiki-docs, arch-wiki-docs-jaAUR for Japanese

- 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.

  https://gitlab.archlinux.org/grawlinson/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 || wikiman

- archwiki-offline — Simple script for offline Arch Wiki experience with preferred listing menus, enabling seamless offline page access.

  https://github.com/niksingh710/archwiki-offline || archwiki-offlineAUR

### Alternative

kiwix-desktop-gitAUR allow browsing the compressed zim format. The ArchWiki zim file can be downloaded from https://library.kiwix.org.

## 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

Tip: For Android there is ArchWiki Viewer for Android, a simple viewer for the online ArchWiki. Page formatting is optimized for mobile viewing.
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- Help

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