使用 Homebrew, apt, MacPorts, dnf 安装 naturaldocs

项目链接

• 主页
• 仓库
• 上游文档
• 软件包管理器页面

命令和别名

• naturaldocs

项目历史

The official About page says Greg Valure wrote Natural Docs after rejecting heavier documentation workflows, open sourced it, and has maintained it since its first release in 2003. The same page records the major architectural shift from the original Perl implementation to Natural Docs 2.0, a C# rewrite with a new engine.

The GitHub repository for the 2.x code was created on 2017-04-17. Public GitHub releases include Natural Docs 2.3 on 2023-09-12, 2.3.1 on 2025-02-01, and 2.4 beta work in 2026.

采用历史

Natural Docs has a long tail rather than a large modern package-manager footprint. The official site says it is used by educational institutions, government, companies, and individuals, and points to public pages generated by Natural Docs as evidence. Homebrew analytics consulted on 2026-07-01 listed 113 installs over the preceding 365 days.

使用方式

Users configure a project with `Project.txt`, which tells Natural Docs which source folders to scan, where to write generated documentation, and project metadata such as title. The reference documentation says command-line options can override parts of Project.txt, partly for compatibility with Natural Docs 1.x workflows.

为什么软件包爱好者会关心

Natural Docs is interesting to package maintainers because it spans two eras of language tooling: old Perl-era source documentation and the 2.x C#/Mono packaging story. The Homebrew formula still depends on Mono, which makes it a reminder that documentation generators often carry runtime packaging constraints long after their core idea stabilizes.

时间线

• 2003: First Natural Docs release, according to the official About page.
• 2015-05-04: Natural Docs 2.0 development release tag appears in the GitHub repository.
• 2017-04-17: GitHub repository created for the 2.x source tree.
• 2023-09-12: Natural Docs 2.3 released.
• 2025-02-01: Natural Docs 2.3.1 released.
• 2026-05-26: Natural Docs 2.4 Beta 1 released as a prerelease.

Related projects

• Comparable documentation generators include Doxygen, Javadoc-style tooling, Sphinx, and language-native documentation systems, but Natural Docs' distinguishing feature is its plain-English comment style.

来源

• https://api.github.com/repos/NaturalDocs/NaturalDocs
• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/naturaldocs
• https://github.com/NaturalDocs/NaturalDocs
• https://github.com/NaturalDocs/NaturalDocs/releases
• https://www.naturaldocs.org/about/
• https://www.naturaldocs.org/reference/project.txt/