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
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: 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 paremeters 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
- Benjamin Gleitzman (@gleitz)
- 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.
- Slack integration available through slack-howdoi.
- 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 set the HOWDOI_URL environment variable to change the source url for answers (default: stackoverflow.com). Other options include serverfault.com or pt.stackoverflow.com. Here's the full list.
- Setting the HOWDOI_COLORIZE environment variable will colorize the output by default.
- Special thanks to Rich Jones (@miserlou) for the idea.
- Checkout the repo
- Run
python -m howdoi.howdoi QUERY
(if you try runningpython howdoi/howdoi.py
you might getValueError: Attempted relative import in non-package
).
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/
An official lxml for python 3.3+ for windows has not yet been released. You may get an error while installing. Try and install an unofficial binary for lxml from
http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#lxml