a documentation viewer for npm
nd is a documentation viewer for npm packages. Similar to
mad(1),
it displays markdown documents in your terminal. Dissimilarly to mad, nd
is written in javascript, and reads documentation out of npm module directories,
not out of its own repository of pages.
By writing this software in javascript, we benefit
from the existing require() circuitry. This means that there is a large
volume of useful documentation available, despite the fact that very few packages
have a doc or docs folder. Nearly every package at least has a
README.md; nd will read this.
If a doc or docs directory is present, or if there is a docs directory
specified in the package.json of some module, documentation will be loaded
out of these directories.
For example, if we type
$ nd npm cli
We will get npm/doc/cli/index.md. So, if additional arguments (besides the
module name) are provided, we try to find a file which is more specific:
we'll look for module/arg1/arg2/index.md, module/arg1/arg2/arg2.md, and
module/arg1/arg2.md. This allows us to be flexible about the organization
of documentation within modules.
To install:
$ sudo npm install -g nd
Note that you may not need sudo if you installed node via a virtual
environment manager such as nvm.
To use:
$ nd modulename
nd searches for modules from within the current directory. If it can't find
the module you're looking for in the current directory, it will search for
modules installed globally with npm -g.
You can also type simply
$ nd
to get a list of modules in the current directory.. You can run nd with the relative
path to a markdown file as an argument and nd will read it, or you can pipe it some stuff:
$ nd README.md
$ curl https://github.com/russfrank/nd/raw/master/README.md | nd
nd can also grab core docs, though, I should note that it always takes them
straight out of master, which might not be what you want:
$ nd node child_process
You can also just straight up give it urls, it'll figure that shit out.
$ nd https://raw.github.com/joyent/node/master/doc/api/child_process.markdown
Also, it works on Windows, since everybody knows that Windows users love to read docs in their terminal:
More ideas:
- Pydoc like web server
- Docco view of source files (markdown comments on left, source on right) in terminal
- picture-tube for images
- command line completion
MIT.