howdoi
instant coding answers via the command line
Are you a hack programmer? Do you find yourself constantly Googling for how to do basic programing 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] 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
Author
- Benjamin Gleitzman (@gleitz)
Notes
- Works with Python2 and Python3
- A standalone Windows executable with the howdoi application is available here.
- An Alfred Workflow for howdoi can be found at http://blog.gleitzman.com/post/48539944559/howdoi-alfred-even-more-instant-answers.
- Howdoi uses a cache for faster access to previous questions. Caching functionality can be disabled by setting the HOWDOI_DISABLE_CACHE environment variable. The cache is stored in ~/.cache/howdoi.
- You can use HOWDOI_LOCALIZATION environment variable to set the localization of your question. Using this will change the search url to the localization url of your choice. Current supported localizations are en and pt-br.
- Special thanks to Rich Jones (@miserlou) for the idea.
Troubleshooting
You might get the following error when installing with Homebrew:
==> python setup.py install http://peak.telecommunity.com/EasyInstall.html Please make the appropriate changes for your system and try again.
Fix the error by executing the following command:
sudo chmod -R go+w /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/