how2: stackoverflow from the terminal

how2 finds the simplest way to do something in a unix shell. It's like man, but you can query it in natural language:

Install

You can install it via npm:

npm install -g how2

if it gives you EACCES errors, you need to fix npm permissions. Or you can just use sudo npm install -g how2 if you don't care.

If you don't have npm:

Then just install NodeJS:

• On Ubuntu try with sudo apt-get install nodejs npm
• On Mac brew install node

Usage

If you don't specify a language it defaults to Bash unix command line. how2 tries to give you immediately the most likely answer:

After that you can press SPACE to go to the interactive mode, where you can choose a different stackoverflow question/answer.

You can use -l lang to find answers for other languages:

How does it work?

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

Why?

Because I can never remember how to do certain things. And reading man pages always takes too long.

Taken from https://xkcd.com/1168/

TODO

• Add automatic copy/paste from -i to command line