IExHelpOpen - opens documentation in a browser window

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Hey everyone,

As you might know, Hex recently got a new option to open up documentation for a particular module in a browser window, e.g.: mix hex.docs open ecto --module Ecto.Changeset which I find very useful.

I thought it would be cool to have similar ability inside an iex session so I built: GitHub - wojtekmach/iex_help_open.

Here’s a quick demo how this works:

Untitled.gif1002×899 1.28 MB

It’s in a very early version and supports just functions, but if there’s interest in it I’d be happy to extend it to support more features. (It would likely require a rewrite from scratch :smile:.) Any feedback and/or contributions are very welcome in the meantime!

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Ah, goodness, this is great! These are the types of tools we really need. I had in mind to make a remote version of this at some point, because I wanted to use it across VM/machine boundaries, so I could spawn new tabs of docs on other machines or outside my VM. I might actually take a look at this to extend it into that. Thanks for rekindling this. :slight_smile:

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With Ehelper I got as far as printing out the url’s for everything you can access via the h command, the standard Erlang libraries, and anything you have installed via hex.

https://github.com/philosophers-stone/ehelper/blob/master/lib/doc_help/print_url.ex

I just looked at the openurl helper and it needs some TLC. I’m thinking some code got lost along the way since
it opens dash url’s.

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nice! I’ve only learned about ehelper some hours after publishing the package above :sweat_smile:

I just looked at the openurl helper and it needs some TLC

the code I’m using for that is taken from hex and it seems to work pretty well: hex/lib/mix/tasks/hex/docs.ex at v0.15.0 · hexpm/hex · GitHub so I suppose it could be that if the user has dash installed then it uses that, otherwise opens it up in the browser.