Command Line shortcut to Elixir's help

Questions / Help
9

You can evaluate arbitrary Elixir commands from the shell, like so:

$ elixir -e "IO.puts 1+1"

Thus, to access documentation you can invoke the h/1 macro from the module IEx.Helpers:

$ elixir -e "require IEx.Helpers; IEx.Helpers.h(Enum.count)"

Obviously, writing the above line every time you want to look up the Elixir documentation for a module or function is very tedious, so instead you could create an executable shell script – say exdoc – then add it to your PATH.

Example Script

Note: Don’t forget to chmod u+x on it.

#!/bin/bash

if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
    echo "USAGE: $(basename $0) [name]"
    exit 1
fi

elixir -e "require IEx.Helpers; IEx.Helpers.h($1)"

Elixir Docs Command

$ exdoc Enum.count
$ exdoc Kernel
... etc

Cheers!

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