Help:Browsing

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
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.
How it works
The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click "edit", not the rendered page. This means that content coming from an included template will not be picked up, but the target of piped links will be. This also means that
the "#redirect" directives
will be searched as well so for redirected pages, they will be listed
twice
together with their redirects.
The search functionality can be considered to operate on
whole words
, separated by spaces or other punctuation marks. So if your search term includes the word 'book', the results will not include pages that only have the word 'books' or 'booklet'. And if your search term includes the term 'inter', the results will not include pages that only have the word 'international', but they may include pages that have the term 'inter-national'.
You can search for all words that begin with a prefix by adding
*
at the end of a word in your query. For example,
book*
will return results for
book
and
book
s
.
You can search for a phrase using double quotes. A phrase can be considered to consist of
whole words
, so the phrase 'Arch Linux' will
not
be found by a search for "ch Lin", but it
will
be found by a search for "Arch Linux".
For more information see
Mediawikiwiki:Help:Searching
.
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
!arch
your search terms
or, even shorter
!aw
your search terms
Search engine shortcuts for Chromium-based browsers
Type in
chrome://settings/searchEngines
into the address bar. Click on "Add" under "Site search". Change
chrome://
to your browser accordingly.
In the "Search engines" field, name this entry, e.g. "ArchWiki".
In the "Shortcut" field, type the text that will trigger this search engine in the address bar e.g.
!aw
In the "URL with %s in place of query" field enter
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Special:Search/%s
as the URL.
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 bottom. 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-ja
AUR
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-man
AUR
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-offline
AUR
Alternative
kiwix-desktop-git
AUR
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.