Sherlock, your neighborhood command-line sloth sleuth
⚡ Never open your browser to look for help again ⚡
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Are you a hack programmer? Do you find yourself constantly Googling for how to do basic programming 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
brew install howdoi
howdoi howdoi
usage: howdoi [-h] [-p POS] [-n NUM] [-a] [-l] [-c] [-x] [-C] [-j] [-v] [-e [ENGINE]]
[--save] [--view] [--remove] [--empty] [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)
-n NUM, --num NUM number of answers to return (default: 1)
-a, --all display the full text of the answer
-l, --link display only the answer link
-c, --color enable colorized output
-x, --explain explain how answer was chosen
-C, --clear-cache clear the cache
-j, --json return answers in raw json format
-v, --version display the current version of howdoi
-e [ENGINE], --engine [ENGINE]
search engine for this query (google, bing, duckduckgo)
--save, --stash stash a howdoi answer
--view view your stash
--remove remove an entry in your stash
--empty empty your stash
environment variable examples:
HOWDOI_COLORIZE=1
HOWDOI_DISABLE_CACHE=1
HOWDOI_DISABLE_SSL=1
HOWDOI_SEARCH_ENGINE=google
HOWDOI_URL=serverfault.com
Using the howdoi stashing feature (for more advanced features view the keep documentation).
stashing: howdoi --save QUERY
viewing: howdoi --view
removing: howdoi --remove (will be prompted which answer to delete)
emptying: howdoi --empty (empties entire stash, will be prompted to confirm)
As a shortcut, if you commonly use the same parameters 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 format date bash
You can also search other StackExchange properties for answers:
HOWDOI_URL=cooking.stackexchange.com howdoi make pesto
or as an alias:
alias hcook='function hcook(){ HOWDOI_URL=cooking.stackexchange.com howdoi $* ; }; hcook'
hcook make pesto
Other useful aliases:
alias hless='function hdi(){ howdoi $* -c | less --raw-control-chars --quit-if-one-screen --no-init; }; hdi'
- Slack integration available through slack-howdoi
- Telegram integration available through howdoi-telegram
- Discord integration available through discord-howdoi
- Emacs integration available through emacs-howdoi
- VSCode integration available on the marketplace
- Alfred integration available through alfred-howdoi
- Benjamin Gleitzman (@gleitz)
- Yanlam Ko (@YKo20010)
- Diana Arreola (@diarreola)
- Eyitayo Ogunbiyi (@tayoogunbiyi)
- Chris Nguyen (@chrisngyn)
- Shageldi Ovezov (@ovezovs)
- Mwiza Simbeye (@mwizasimbeye11)
- Shantanu Verma (@SaurusXI)
- Sheza Munir (@ShezaMunir)
- Jyoti Bisht (@joeyouss)
- And more!
We welcome contributions that make howdoi better and improve the existing functionalities of the project. We have created a separate guide to contributing to howdoi that explains how to get up and running with your first pull request.
- Works with Python 3.7 and newer. Unfortunately Python 2.7 support has been discontinued :(
- Special thanks to Rich Jones (@miserlou) for the idea
- More thanks to Ben Bronstein for the logo