[Announce] haddoc and haddoc.el

[Martin Blais]

Description
===========

Haddoc is a simple tool that allows an emacs user to search the Python HTML
documentation indexes and to bring a web browser to an index term page.

Motivation
----------

Even though I have the Python TexInfo documentation installed from my Emacs,
somehow I always end up browsing the documentation from a web browser.  Most of
the time I start from either the Python Library Reference or from the index.  I
wanted to be able to bring up the documentation from within Emacs.   This does
it.

With haddoc, you invoke the elisp function ``haddoc-lookup`` (I type ``C-c .``),
enter some search terms, and the matches from the Python indexes are shown in a
buffer, from which you can select to direct your external web browser to.  I
like to drive an external Firefox with it.


Design
------

I took the simple approach and wrote a combination of Emacs-LISP and Python code
to implement this:

* ``haddoc-update``: a Python script that will parse the HTML documentation
  indexes and generate a mapping of the index entries to the HTML pages in a DBM
  database (in ``/var/lib/haddoc/haddoc.db`` by default)

* ``haddoc-lookup``: a Python script that does a lookup of search terms
  (potentially incomplete) on the index keys and returns the page references for
  each of the search terms on stdout

* ``haddoc.el``: an Emacs-LISP package that can query the results of
  ``haddoc-lookup`` and spawn a webbrowser to the appropriate pages.



Download at:
http://furius.ca/downloads/haddoc/releases/


Cheers,