Show HN: how2 – stackoverflow.com from the terminal

https://github.com/santinic/how2

by csantini • 10 years ago

272 43 10 years ago

github.com

danso3• 10 years ago

Nice! Installed it and will now make it part of all the computers I use.

I found this funny:

It uses Google and Stackoverflow APIs, because Stackoverflow search on its own doesn't works as well.

It doesn't really make sense why Google would be a better entrance point into StackOverflow's content -- but it is -- as I imagine the Google algorithm uses SO's API itself to incorporate SO's data into pagerank in some way (the tags, the points, etc.)...OTOH, after landing on a particular question via Google, if it isn't the thing I actually need, I find SO's list of related questions to almost always be on point.

csantini6• 10 years ago

Try Stackexchange search, it never gets you what you are looking for, they are just using some kind of Elastic Search.

I think Google instead indexes SO pages as any html, and does a much better job at figuring out what "unzip .bz2" means.

forgotpwtomain• 10 years ago

Google ignores special characters though - that makes it really hard to search for some things.

oneeyedpigeon• 10 years ago

IME, Google's search is better than 99.9% of internal site searches.

dogweather2• 10 years ago

Which is weird because a site's designers _know_ which parts of the content are relevant.

Mizza• 10 years ago

Or the more mature 'howdoi' - https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi

csantini6• 10 years ago

howdoi beahaves in a very different way. It doesn't give you unix.stackexchange.com answers by default:

$ howdoi unzip bz2

readcsvbz2file <- read.csv(bzfile("file.csv.bz2"))

how2 switches API depending on what language you are querying.

danso3• 10 years ago

It's also much nicer looking and more interactive, FWIW...I also agree with its defaults.

    $ howdoi inverse grep a file

Simply pops this up:

      $ grep -L "foo" *

...apparently it scrapes the answer result and print the last occurrence of code-formatted text.

Whereas `how2` pretty-prints the entire answer, narrative and code, so I know what the respondent was actually addressing. FWIW, both tools don't address what I want (I was thinking `grep -v`)...but that's not a fault of the tools, but of the ambiguity in how we ask questions. `howdoi` has far more faith in there being "Just One Answer"...where `how2` let's you move very quickly between the relevant choices, giving you the right amount of context to navigate.

Well done OP!

provemewrong• 10 years ago

I like how they both include the same xkcd comic in the readme.

mixmastamyk3• 10 years ago

Yay python, don't need to install (another) giant runtime. Looks like healthy competition though.

GordonS• 10 years ago

At first, I thought 'why2'?!

But then I saw the video, the way you can specify a language, and the nice format that results are displayed in, along with the option to see more options - this is actually quite nice!

It would be good to have the option to use it with Server Fault (also from StackExchange network) too.

amelius• 10 years ago

How does it perform the natural language processing in the search? Or does it rely on stackoverflow for that?

csantini6• 10 years ago

it uses Google. Because stackoverflow doesn't give you what you want.

skoczymroczny• 10 years ago

Does it know how to parse HTML using regexes?

csantini6• 10 years ago

Not yet.

brudgers• 10 years ago

Over the long run, if I'm living in the terminal rather than the browser, I probably will be better off learning to be effective finding help via `man` pages rather than taking on a dependency on a latent network connection and "possibly" relevant content...and node and npm and javascript.

In the short run, a tool like this may make it easier to get to the point where I am living in the terminal.

mixmastamyk3• 10 years ago

man can't help with many/most? languages. Though I agree a node dependency on lean computers is too much.

calebm• 10 years ago

The next logical step is stackoverflow-powered code generation :)

ihuman• 10 years ago

This already exists: https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/

astazangasta• 10 years ago

My first reaction ("Wowza!") was tempered by the fear that this sort of intervening layer may erode participation (and thus quality) of Stack Overflow. I suppose such a thing will never be popular enough to make this sort of effect.

anthk• 10 years ago

apropos

chishaku• 10 years ago

Very nice. I much prefer this to howdoi.

A couple suggestions:

Does the `-l lang` flag correspond to stackoverflow tags which aren't necessarily limited to languages?

This should be specified because the right tag can significantly increase the quality of search results.

Also, it would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut that opens a question/answer in the browser. That way I can easily vote.

csantini6• 10 years ago

I'm not currently using tags, thank you for the suggestion. Not sure is available in the SO api, I'll check.

The keyboard shortcut is not hard to add. You could do it yourself :P

haphazardeous• 10 years ago

Saw this earlier this morning but just had to use it and boom! It worked perfectly. I really like the idea of using things on the console and the user interface is nice and sleek. would love to see this getting even better over time!

andrepd• 10 years ago

Awesome! It would be great if I could use it to query any stackexchange site, like TeX, for instance. Like `how2 prevent table from floating -s tex` would search on tex.se

csantini6• 10 years ago

Actually that answer would be on tex.stackexchange.com.

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/2275/keeping-tables-f...

I'm not supporting this yet, let's see if I can make it work so that it uses also other stackexchange.com domains.

Thanks for the suggestion!

na85• 10 years ago

I believe tex.stackexchange.com is what GP meant by "tex.se", as in "tex.StackExchange"

redwards510• 10 years ago

This is awesome! I have one burning question though: what is the proper -l lang parameter to use for Windows consoles? I tried:

how2 -l windows enable tab completion

and got nothing. "PowerShell" and "batch" bring back results, but I am drawing a blank on what to call the Windows Shell (cmd.exe). Thanks!

vadskye• 10 years ago

"how2 -l cmd change directory" works for me. "how2 -l cmd enable tab completion" still returns nothing, though; I think that's just a query it can't answer. (A quick manual search returned totally unhelpful results, so I wouldn't blame how2 for that...)

uxcn• 10 years ago

Text web browsers also make a lot of stuff like this reasonably easy inside a terminal. Someone mentioned http://elinks.or.cz/ a while ago.

jimmyppi• 10 years ago

Another alternative that just searches google (or bing if you want to go crazy) and extracts commands from the search hits: https://github.com/jimmyppi/searchcmd

  $ searchcmd "unzip bz2"
  .....
  tar xjvf        (michaelangela.wordpress.com, superuser.com)
  bunzip2 filename.bz2    (cyberciti.biz, linuxquestions.org)
  tar xvjf filename.tar.bz2       (superuser.com)
  bzip2 -d filename.bz2   (superuser.com)
  bzip2 -dk filename.bz2  (superuser.com)

parsethis• 10 years ago

loving this! helps me stay in the terminal

Show HN: how2 – stackoverflow.com from the terminal

Related Stories