Howdoi.el -- instant coding answers via Emacs.

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 when you can just M-x howdoi-query RET format date bash RET

Howdoi.el is a way to query Stack Overflow directly from the Emacs and get back the most upvoted answer to the first question that comes up for that query.

Installation

Copy howdoi.el file to the ~/.emacs.d/ folder and put the line

(load-file "~/.emacs.d/howdoi.el")

into the ~/.emacs configuration file.

Usage

The following two commands show an answer in a pop up buffer:

 M-x howdoi-query RET <your-query> RET ;; e.g.: M-x howdoi-query RET format date bash RET
 M-x howdoi-query-line-at-point ;; takes a query from a line at point and shows an answer in a pop up buffer.

To get an answer containing only code snippet you could use:

 M-x howdoi-query-line-at-point-replace-by-code-snippet

this command replaces current line with a code snippet parsed from an answer or do

 M-x howdoi-query-insert-code-snippet-at-point

to get a code snippet for given query. The code snippet is inserted at point.

With that command you could get situation when it returns not good enough code snippet. Or may be after that command you would like to get more details which relates to the original query. Then you could use the following command:

M-x howdoi-show-current-question

This one will show (in a pop up buffer) full answer which contains recently inserted code snippet. This command may help sometimes to avoid additional googling when original query is a little bit ambiguous.

By default pop up buffer displays only answers. You could change howdoi-display-question custom variable to show also a question.

In the mentioned pop up buffer enables HowDoI major-mode. There are such key bindings are available:

• n - howdoi-show-next-question
• p - howdoi-show-previous-question
• b - howdoi-browse-current-question
• u - howdoi-query
• < - beginning-of-buffer
• > - end-of-buffer
• q - quit window

There is also howdoi-minor-mode available with a list of key bindings:

• C-c C-o n - howdoi-show-next-question
• C-c C-o p - howdoi-show-previous-question
• C-c C-o c - howdoi-show-current-question
• C-c C-o b - howdoi-browse-current-question
• C-c C-o u - howdoi-query
• C-c C-o l - howdoi-query-line-at-point
• C-c C-o r - howdoi-query-line-at-point-replace-by-code-snippet

Example

For example there is the line in the scratch buffer:

python file exists

point is located somewhere on this line.

After M-x howdoi-query-line-at-point-replace-by-code-snippet this line will be replaced by something like the following:

try:
   with open('filename'):
       process()
   except IOError:
       print 'Oh dear.'

Other example: there is the line in the scratch buffer:

elisp split string

After M-x howdoi-query-line-at-point-replace-by-code-snippet this line will be replaced by:

(split-string "1.2.3" "\.")

You may be wondered: why "." is escaped with two ''? You could execute then M-x howdoi-show-current-question and the full answer will be shown so you'll be able to get an explanation.

And last example: just execute M-x howdoi-query RET howdoi RET and it will return an answer in a pop up buffer.

In a pop up buffer you could press "n" to view next question, "p" to view previous question and "b" to browse question in a www browser.

Author

Andrey Tykhonov (atykhonov at gmail.com; @atykhonov)

Notes

Please contribute if you like too! :) Otherwise write down your suggestions, comments, feature requests etc etc etc.

Thank you! And Enjoy!

Contributors

• Graydon Hoare
• Łukasz Jędrzejewski