What is Slate?
Slate helps you create beautiful API documentation. Think of it as an intelligent, responsive documentation template for your API.
Slate is a tool in the Documentation as a Service & Tools category of a tech stack.
Slate is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Slate's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Slate?
Companies
17 companies reportedly use Slate in their tech stacks, including MEGA, mifos, and Got Anyalo.
Developers
44 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Slate.
Pros of Slate
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Slate's Features
- Clean, intuitive design — with Slate, the description of your API is on the left side of your documentation, and all the code examples are on the right side. Inspired by Stripe's and Paypal's API docs. Slate is responsive, so it looks great on tablets, phones, and even print.
- Everything on a single page — gone are the days where your users had to search through a million pages to find what they wanted. Slate puts the entire documentation on a single page. We haven't sacrificed linkability, though. As you scroll, your browser's hash will update to the nearest header, so linking to a particular point in the documentation is still natural and easy.
- Slate is just Markdown — when you write docs with Slate, you're just writing Markdown, which makes it simple to edit and understand. Everything is written in Markdown — even the code samples are just Markdown code blocks!
- Write code samples in multiple languages — if your API has bindings in multiple programming languages, you easily put in tabs to switch between them. In your document, you'll distinguish different languages by specifying the language name at the top of each code block, just like with Github Flavored Markdown!
- Out-of-the-box syntax highlighting for almost 60 languages, no configuration required.
- Automatic, smoothly scrolling table of contents on the far left of the page. As you scroll, it displays your current position in the document. It's fast, too. We're using Slate at TripIt to build documentation for our new API, where our table of contents has over 180 entries. We've made sure that the performance remains excellent, even for larger documents.
- Let your users update your documentation for you — by default, your Slate-generated documentation is hosted in a public Github repository. Not only does this mean you get free hosting for your docs with Github Pages, but it also makes it's simple for other developers to make pull requests to your docs if they find typos or other problems. Of course, if you don't want to, you're welcome to not use Github and host your docs elsewhere!
Slate Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Slate?
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
Python
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
jQuery
jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.
