Force godot docs to english

Recently I started messing around with the Godot Engine. An open source game engine for 2D and 3D games. Naturally I google a lot of methods and classes from their docs to get shite done.

The Godot docs even support multiple languages! But for me this causes a small issue. Coming from germany my google search results often contain german Godot docs articles. Personally I'm not a fan of reading software documentation in german as I'm not used to the german translations of tech terminology.

So I needed a solution to turn german godot articles into english articles. The Godot Docs page doesn't have a language switcher, but you can simply replace the language code in their url by your desired language code.

Redirector 🎬

Replacing the url is boring. And boring things should be done by robots.🤖 Or something like this... So let me introduce you to the "Redirector" chrome plugin.

Redirector allows you to define rules based on which you can rewrite your opened urls into different urls. It uses regular expressions to detect and construct urls.

In our case I'm using it to replace the /de/ in https://docs.godotengine.org/de/stable/tutorials/physics/using_kinematic_body_2d.html with /en/.

(1.) Install "Redirector" from the chrome plugin page and open the configuration page (Button "Edit Redirects").

(2.) Import the Redirector.json rule to transform /de/ urls to /en/ ones.

(3.) After that make sure the Redirector plugin is turned on by clicking on "Enable Redirector".

(4.) If you now open a german godot docs page it should redirect you to the /en/ version immediately. 🥳

Make your own rules

You can also create your own rule from scratch to transform from different languages. Important fields are:

Redirect:

Here: (docs\.godotengine.org)\/(de)\/(.*)

The Redirect field defines a regex pattern to match the url the redirect should be applied to. You can experiment with this pattern on Regexr.com.

Redirect to:

Here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/$3

The Redirect to field defines the url, that "Redirector" should navigate to once it matched the url. It uses the capture groups from the Redirect regex. In this case I'm appending the third caputre group (.*) (everything that follows after the language code) as $3.