howdoi
instant coding answers via the command line
Are you a hack programmer? Do you find yourself constantly Googling for how to do basic programming tasks?
Suppose you want to know how to format a date in bash. Why open your browser and read through blogs (risking major distraction) when you can simply stay in the console and ask howdoi:
::
$ howdoi format date bash
> DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
howdoi will answer all sorts of queries:
::
$ howdoi print stack trace python
> import traceback
>
> try:
> 1/0
> except:
> print '>>> traceback <<<'
> traceback.print_exc()
> print '>>> end of traceback <<<'
> traceback.print_exc()
$ howdoi convert mp4 to animated gif
> video=/path/to/video.avi
> outdir=/path/to/output.gif
> mplayer "$video" \
> -ao null \
> -ss "00:01:00" \ # starting point
> -endpos 10 \ # duration in second
> -vo gif89a:fps=13:output=$outdir \
> -vf scale=240:180
$ howdoi create tar archive
> tar -cf backup.tar --exclude "www/subf3" www
Installation
::
pip install howdoi
or
::
pip install git+https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi.git#egg=howdoi
or
::
brew install https://raw.github.com/gleitz/howdoi/master/howdoi.rb
or
::
python setup.py install
Usage
::
usage: howdoi.py [-h] [-p POS] [-a] [-l] [-c] [-n NUM_ANSWERS] [-C] [-v] QUERY [QUERY ...]
instant coding answers via the command line
positional arguments:
QUERY the question to answer
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-p POS, --pos POS select answer in specified position (default: 1)
-a, --all display the full text of the answer
-l, --link display only the answer link
-c, --color enable colorized output
-n NUM_ANSWERS, --num-answers NUM_ANSWERS
number of answers to return
-C, --clear-cache clear the cache
-v, --version displays the current version of howdoi
As a shortcut, if you commonly use the same parameters each time and don't want to type them, add something similar to your .bash_profile (or otherwise). This example gives you 5 colored results each time.
::
alias h='function hdi(){ howdoi $* -c -n 5; }; hdi'
And then to run it from the command line simply type:
::
$h this is my query for howdoi