so

A terminal interface for StackOverflow.

Note: still working out some kinks. Initial release not published just yet.

example usage

While I like the acronym so, this tool would actually be better described as se: an interface to the StackExchange network. In particular one thing that differentiates it from similar tools is that you can simultaneously search any number of sites in the StackExchange network:

# use default configured sites, e.g. [stackoverflow.com]
$ so how do i reverse a list in python

# search for a latex solution
$ so --site tex how to put tilde over character

# use google to search stackoverflow.com, askubuntu.com, and unix.stackexchange.com
$ so -e google -s askubuntu -s stackoverflow -s unix how do i install linux

installation

The quickest installation method is to download the appropriate binary from the [release artifacts](TODO link). Right now I'm only building the most common targets, but in theory it should be easy to add more, so if you don't see what you are looking for just open an issue and I can add it. Here's a list of the supported targets. You can quickly install the binary for your OS with:

$ curl -LSfs https://samtay.github.io/so/install.sh | \
    sh -s -- --git samtay/so

cargo

cargo install so

documentation

api keys

If you want to use your own StackExchange API Key you can set it via

so --set-api-key <KEY>

You can also choose to use no key by editing your configuration to api_key: ~. If for some reason my API key is globally throttled, you can hit the StackExchange API with no key up to 300 times per day per IP, which I imagine is fine for most users.

multi-site searching

As stated in the docs,

If a single IP is making more than 30 requests a second, new requests will be dropped.

So, don't go crazy with the multi-site search, since it is all done in parallel. In particular, if you specify more than 30 sites, SE will likely ban you for a short time.

selecting a backend

If you're installing from source, you can choose from a number of available backend rendering engines. Note that the package default and windows feature flags do not have an ncurses dependency, for the sake of simplicity. The default backend is termion, a bindless library in pure Rust which seems to work quite well on Linux, MacOS, BSD, and Redox. The windows backend is by default crossterm, and while its level of support is awesome, it does comes at a price in performance. On my machine, the app kind of flashes between draws quite a bit. So if you are on Mac, Linux, or Redox, your best bet is to compile with default features which uses the termion backend. If you are on windows, use crossterm, but know it will be slightly jumpy.

If the crossterm folks figure out a fix for allowing ncurses to receive resize events, and you have ncurses installed on your system, then the ncurses and pancurses backends will also work well. Just know that currently if you choose this option, and you run the --lucky prompt, you won't be able to resize the terminal window while the TUI is open.

Available backends:

• termion-backend
• ncurses-backend
• pancurses-backend
• crossterm-backend

E.g. to use ncurses-backend:

cargo install so --no-default-features --features ncurses-backend

See more information on this choice here.

contributions

This was my first time writing Rust, and I wrote about it here if you're into that sort of thing. I just want to put out a warning that there is very likely some non-idiomatic and straight up ugly code throughout this project, so don't come looking here for a good Rust example! That being said, I would love to improve the codebase so if you have any refactoring contributions feel free to send me a PR, but please also accompany them with a short explanation.