I’m really frustrated with the current state of CUDA documentation. Coming from a Linux background, I’m used to having comprehensive man pages for APIs and system calls that I can quickly reference from the terminal.
However, when working with CUDA development, there are no traditional man pages available for the CUDA API functions. Instead, we’re stuck with online documentation that can be cumbersome to navigate when you just need a quick reference for function signatures or parameter details.
This makes development workflow much slower, especially when you’re coding offline or have limited internet access. Has anyone found a good alternative or workaround for this issue? Are there any community-maintained man pages or offline documentation tools that provide similar functionality for CUDA API references?
This stems from NVIDIA’s web-first documentation approach, which frankly doesn’t align well with traditional Unix development workflows. I’ve found that using devdocs.io provides a decent offline alternative - you can download the CUDA documentation for local access and it has reasonable search functionality. Another approach I use is maintaining a personal cheat sheet with commonly used function signatures in a simple text file that I can grep through quickly. The lack of proper man pages is particularly annoying when you’re SSH’d into remote systems without GUI browsers. NVIDIA probably assumes most developers work in IDEs with integrated documentation, but that’s not always practical for system-level CUDA work. You might also want to check if your distro has any community-maintained packages that provide some form of local CUDA documentation, though I haven’t found anything that truly replicates the man page experience.
I’ve dealt with this exact issue for years and ended up creating my own solution. What I did was download the entire CUDA toolkit documentation as PDFs when I had good internet, then used a combination of grep-able text files and a simple shell script to search through function definitions locally. It’s not as elegant as proper man pages, but it works well enough for quick lookups. The real problem is that NVIDIA seems to focus more on web-based documentation systems rather than traditional Unix tooling, which is unfortunate since many of us CUDA developers work in environments where quick terminal access is essential. I also keep a local copy of the programming guide and runtime API reference as searchable PDFs, which helps when you need detailed explanations beyond just function signatures.
honestly this bugged me too until i started using zeal documentation browser. it caches cuda docs offline and has decent search, tho setup is bit tedious. nvidia clearly dosnt care about terminal workflows which sucks for headless development setups.