One way to access the ruby gem documentation quickly is gem server which starts a http server at http://localhost:8808. This does not work on my Vista laptop, which prefers http://127.0.0.1:8808/. What disturbs me is another busy server console along the rails console and 5 others which I keep open. Recently I came accross the bdoc gem, which links to my rdocs on the fly using jQueried html. Needed some hand to run on Windows though (require 'fileutils' and 'file:///' prefix for local URLs) - here is a patched bdoc.rb 0.2.2.