I got somewhat inspired after reading Call by Meaning from the awesome Viewpoints Research Institute. It reminded me of the howdoi CLI tool which searches for answers on StackOverflow and shows winning code snippets directly.
So my thought was – why not just make plugin for code editor which would do the same thing. Now I can just write a comment on what I want to do, press some key combination and get the code written automatically.
Let’s see how it works. For example when developing some script in Python you don’t know how to make HTTP request (I never remember such details myself). So you instead of going to Google as usual you just write comment like this:
When you finished writing comment just press ctrl-h and get code inserted automatically.
# make http request
import urllib2
urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com/foo/bar").read()With some you luck you may write good part of your program this way :)
Note that one big plus compared to howdoi is that this plugin includes current file language name into query automatically. So many keystrokes saved! It reduces your carbon footprint :)
Check installation instructions for info on how to try it.