A common complaint from a co-worker is not being able to find relevant library functionality. We have libraries that do some tasks well, but if you haven’t used it before, how are you to know that it is there. More over, how do you find what you are looking for from all of the available utility libraries currently loaded.

After seeing Peter Seibel’s Manifest screencast. I was struck by the idea that you could index all the doc strings to provide a powerful search tool. I dont know about powerful yet, but this idea has turned into at least a search tool: Manifest-Search. This is the product of one days hacking and so should not be construed as the end-all-be-all common lisp search tool, however, it is at least a step in that direction.

I would like to eventually get this integrated more fully with both quicklisp and manifest, but that is all in the future. I think it would be amazing to search for functionality I need, and get documentation for a library I have not yet installed, but is distributed by quicklisp.