One of my favorite collaborations to come out of the illustrious Oxidized Bismuth Blogger (OxBiz) ideation list is howdoi, a tool for instant coding answers via the command line.

The idea is simple – ask a question and get an answer.

$ howdoi format date bash > DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`

Howdoi solves life’s little coding mysteries like the always frustrating command line flags for tar (as illustrated by XKCD).

Why open your browser and read through blogs (risking major distraction) when you can simply stay in the console and ask howdoi :

$ howdoi create tar archive > tar -cf backup.tar --exclude "www/subf3" www

Howdoi is a hack programmer’s best friend, garnering more than 1.8K stars and 140 forks on github and surprisingly well-received by the oft-finicky Hacker News. Following a flurry of pull requests the current version boasts colorization, caching, an Alfred workflow, support for multiple answers, and more.

The next time you’re searching for a coding answer think twice before opening your browser to read through blogs. With howdoi the answer might be closer than you think.

Find more tips and tricks @gleitz.