Baby step: Allow no keywords on the command line, and introduce -h, --help option

[zmwangx]

This is point 4 of #87 (comment).

---

All the machinery is almost there, just need to flip the switch.

Instead of printing the help text when there's is no argument, we now support the standard -h, --help option, and a command line with no argument leads us into the REPL immediately.

Transcript of a sample session:

> googler -C -w github.com -n 3
Please initiate a query.
googler (? for help): f
Initiate a query first.
googler (? for help): n
Initiate a query first.
googler (? for help): o
Initiate a query first.
googler (? for help): googler

 1 GitHub - jarun/googler: Google from the command-line
https://github.com/jarun/googler
Google from the command-line. Contribute to googler development by
creating an account on GitHub.

 2 googler/googler.1 at master · jarun/googler · GitHub
https://github.com/jarun/googler/blob/master/googler.1
Google from the command-line. Contribute to googler development by
creating an account on GitHub.

 3 googler/README.md at master · jarun/googler · GitHub
https://github.com/jarun/googler/blob/master/README.md
Google from the command-line. Contribute to googler development by
creating an account on GitHub.

googler (? for help): q

Also fixed a bug in GooglerArgumentParser where file is not being defaulted to sys.stderr.

[zmwangx]

Damn, really hope we have some sort auto-generation mechanism for the man page.

[jarun]

Grapse helps to some extent.

[jarun]

Thank you!

[zmwangx]

Grapse helps to some extent.

The demo seems to be in mdoc with a quick glance. I suppose it has a groff_man mode?

[zmwangx]

It doesn't seem to work?

[zmwangx]

Or should we switch to mdoc? AFAIK mdoc is certainly more pleasant than groff_man, and arguably better documented, IIRC.

[zmwangx]

Actually, although I had no luck with http://www.roperzh.com/grapse/, live preview for man pages is a very good idea. I'll hack up something this weekend. The idea is very simple, and is easily done with a bit of Python/Shell and a bit of JavaScript:

• groff_man to generate HTML;
• webbrowser.open to open HTML, except that we append a <script> tag for auto refreshing;
• Have a daemon watch for source file changes, regen HTML on change.

And https://github.com/joeyespo/grip can be used as an example.
There's also https://github.com/mgedmin/restview which is similar.

[jarun]

It doesn't seem to work?

Hmmm... That's a problem. I never tested with googler.

I gifted them their first bug and we'll wait for a while on this :).

[zmwangx]

They don't support groff, that's all.

[jarun]

Ahh, just saw their readme.

[jarun]

This should work for you (OS X only): http://sveinbjorn.org/mandrake

[jarun]

I'm going through mdoc.

[zmwangx]

http://sveinbjorn.org/mandrake

Looks nice, but that also seems to be a mdoc editor. At least it won't render our man page.

[zmwangx]

groff -man -Thtml output is crap, but man's plain text output is very easy to parse, so it's easy to convert it to HTML. I'll do the previewer when I have time.

[zmwangx]

Just to give you a sense of what I could achieve with a pretty trivial parsing script:

I'll call it a day, and prepare for my tomorrow's exam.

[jarun]

👍

[jarun]

I think you should create a new project and share this with the world. ;)
Many devs will be very happy.

[zmwangx]

I think you should create a new project and share this with the world. ;)

Exactly what I had in mind. But in reality it would be something trivial, like a single Python script.

[jarun]

Yes, but it's better that one person writes it than everyone writing it.

[jarun]

BTW, quick question because I didn't reach there yet (and donno where it is):

If we move to mdoc with the command:

man googler

work? Or we need to invoke something else?

[zmwangx]

man googler work? Or we need to invoke something else?

It should work, but need to double check on Linux. At least the official FreeBSD man pages are in mdoc AFAIK, and OS X being close to FreeBSD also has a lot of mdoc man pages too.

You can check the man page of BSD tar on Linux if you have time: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ea1f802fa997f9d7fb707ec8f57145fa. I don't want to spin up a Linux box at the moment.

Yes, but it's better that one person writes it than everyone writing it.

Yeah, what I meant to say is that it's somewhat more subtable for a gist...

I'll throw what I have here in case you're interested. Apparently it's not integrated and have rendering problems for now, but I'll polish when I have time.

previewman:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import sys
import textwrap

def to_html(ms):
    length = len(ms)
    ms += chr(0) * 2
    bs = chr(8)
    hs = textwrap.dedent("""
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <head>
    <title>man page</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    <div style="width: 846px; margin: auto">
    <pre>
    """)
    inbold = False
    inunderline = False
    i = 0
    while i < length:
        # TODO: Both bold and underline
        ch = ms[i]
        if ms[i+1] == bs:
            bold = (ch == ms[i+2])
            underline = (ch == '_')
        else:
            bold = underline = False

        if inbold and not bold:
            hs += '</b>'
            inbold = False
        if inunderline and not underline:
            hs += '</u>'
            inunderline = False

        if bold:
            if not inbold:
                hs += '<b>'
            inbold = True
            i += 2
        if underline:
            if not inunderline:
                hs += '<u>'
            inunderline = True
            ch = ms[i+2]
            i += 2

        if ch == '<':
            hs += '&lt;'
        elif ch == '>':
            hs += '&gt;'
        else:
            hs += ch
        i += 1
    hs += textwrap.dedent("""
    </pre>
    </div>
    </body>
    """)
    return hs

def main():
    sys.stdout.write(to_html(sys.stdin.read()))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Then

> COLUMNS=120 PAGER=cat man ~/dev/src/forks/googler/googler.1 </dev/null | ./previewman | browser

[jarun]

👍

[jarun]

You can check the man page of BSD tar on Linux if you have time

Will confirm in the evening.

[zmwangx]

As you can see, text processing in Python... Such a shame.

But I'm not a Perl wizard, and even worse at Awk, so that's it, a poorly performing piece of crap that somehow does the job (almost).

[jarun]

I think in a combat it's better to use familiar weapons than suicide with brand new ones (without proper training).

[jarun]

It should work, but need to double check on Linux.

Just checked. Works fine.

[jarun]

I found this one as well: ronn

[zmwangx]

Knew that one, not impressed. I once tried all Markdown to man (groff) converters on the market and was very disappointed by the quality (not sure if the quality of stuff have since improved). Among lightweight markup languages I only know AsciiDoc (or rather, the implementation a2x(1)) as being reasonably good at man pages: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/chunked/ch24.html. Plus AsciiDoc is kinda endorsed by Linus.

[jarun]

asciidoc looks good too. I can try this out. Anything that makes life easier with man pages.