Howdoi: Instant coding answers

[gleitz]

howdoi

Download the Workflow | Fork on Github

Instant coding answers via Alfred

⚡ Never open your browser to look for help again ⚡

Introduction to howdoi

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 use the `tar` command. Why open your browser and read through blogs (risking major distraction) when you can simply stay in Alfred and ask:

$ howdoi properly use tar command
> tar -czf /tmp/workspace.tar.gz .

Installation

• Make sure howdoi is installed on your machine with brew install howdoi.

Usage

Invoke the Alfred workflow with the keyword Question Keyword (default: howdoi) and then your query. The output will be shown as large type and also copied to the clipboard. Use ⌘↩ to open the answer's web page instead.

 

 

New to howdoi? You can get started by running:

howdoi howdoi

Notes

If `howdoi` is installed to a non-standard Homebrew location (or with `pip`) then you need to tell Alfred about your appropriate `PATH`.

• Open the Workflow in Alfred
• Click "prepare workflow configuration" in the top right (the icon looks like `(x)`)
• Select the "Environment Variables" tab
• Make a new entry with name PATH and value as the text output of entering echo $PATH in a terminal, e.g. `/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Users/username/.homebrew/bin`.

Useful Links

• howdoi github page

Edited January 26 by gleitz
Update for version 0.0.2

[gleitz]

New release: `v0.0.2`. Get it at https://github.com/gleitz/alfred-howdoi/blob/v0.0.2/Howdoi.alfredworkflow

[GatorMapi]

@gleitz Where does it pull the coding answers from?

[gleitz]

It feels a bit like magic, doesn't it? It's not an AI or Large Language Model - just a clever use of search engines to find relevant Stack Overflow pages and then extract useful code snippets.

Edited February 7 by gleitz