Re: Search StackOverflow and paste code snippets without leaving the edited file

[Tom]

Andrey Tykhonov <atykhonov <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> I just recently finished new version of howdoi.el :
> https://github.com/atykhonov/emacs-howdoi
> 
> It was totally reimplemented. And now it doesn't require python's `howdoi`
> command line tool. It works without it.

Now that it does not need an external tool I tried it and it seems to
work nicely. Good job.


> 
> I was looking for a elisp library which will help to parse html. And I
> found libxml-parse-html-region but I was not able to use it as my emacs
> required to be re-compiled with libxml. Well, I recompiled it and now that
> function is available for me but I decided to avoid usage of this function
> as this dependency may be broken for someone else. So for html-parsing I
> used regexps. May be that was wrong decision to use regexps... I would like
> to hear your opinions about it.

I think it's a good decision not to add external dependencies if it
can be avoided.  I liked it that the package is self contained and it
does not need additional libraries to install.


> Look forward for your comments, suggestions, opinions, feature requests!...

Some ideas:

- There could be a message when the question is retrieved, so the
user sees something is happening. Minor issue.

- A key could be added, so the user can jump to the question on 
stackoverflow from the howdoi buffer.

- Sometimes there are links in the answer:

E.g. Have a look at <a href="...">str_replace</a>

These could be rendered as links, so the user can click on them in the
howdoi buffer.


It occured to me it would be convenient to choose from a list of
suggestions when inputting the search query, similary when searching
on google, but this latter feature does not need to be added to
howdoi, because helm already implemented it, so it's trivial to create
a helm source which calls howdoi. I just mention it here, so potential
users know they can easily enhance howdoi input with helm:

https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/blob/master/helm-net.el#L199