manp

A portable command-line utility for generating a man-page equivalent for your custom project.

Tired of looking throughout the build directory of your project for the functions you wrote weeks before or don't remember their parameters. Want to find a quick way of querying functions and modules while displaying them like the on-line man pages?

manp is a command-line utility that lets you create a man pages equivalent documentation of your project. This is similar to how man printf works for C/C++ functions. But, now you can manp [YOUR_FUNCTIONS] from your source code instead.

All files of extension TARGET_FILE_EXTN are recursively searched inside the manp/target_data folder and added to the data section of the manp in the form of header includes.

If incorrect modules are entered, manp also has a feature for auto-suggesting most similar named module.

Installation

Running make without setting any SOURCE_DIR or TARGET_FILE_EXTN creates a default manp portable executable with documentation for the Python standard library modules and functions.

Requirements:

• Python 3.5+
• g++ compiler
• bash shell

For OSX and Linux Only

1. Clone the repository.
2. Set the SOURCE_DIR (Absolute path to your build directory) and TARGET_FILE_EXTN(File extensions added to manp, separated by a single space inside double quotes) inside the makefile_configuration.mk file. The SOURCE_DIR can be specified to any directory, the make commands recursively search through the source to find all files of the extension TARGET_FILE_EXTN. The REPLACE_OLD_TARGET variable, if set to True will clean the target_data folder before make.
3. After the Use makefile_configuration.mk config file has been properly set, manp can be compiled and the execute permissions be set. ( The original download from GitHub builds a manp Python documentation )

make all
chmod a+x manp

Note: If the .mk config file is not changed, the make command can also be run like so:

make SOURCE_DIR=/usr/project/src TARGET_FILE_EXTN="txt py md"

4. Add the manp executable to PATH var for faster execution so that manp can be called using a bash shell from any directory and speeds documentation lookup.

   • Recommended:

     manp can be indirectly added to the current PATH variable by creating a symlink to /usr/local/bin using the absoute path of the manp executable.

     ln -s /[ABSOLUTE_PATH]/manp /usr/local/bin

     Note: If the original location of the manp executable is changed, the soft link must be updated again with the above command.

   • Alternative:

     copy manp to /usr/local/bin with:

     cp manp /usr/local/bin

     Note: Every time, there is a change to the source code, the manp binary will have to be recopied to usr/local/bin.

Note: If there are any permission issues, use sudo. The manp executable can be directly added to the PATH var if sudo access is not present.

Utility functions

Only for Python projects as of now:

The python generate_txt_from_python_progs.py function can be used to generate txt files containing information on individual functions and classes, the source folder is denoted by [SOURCE_FILE_DIR] while the target folder is denoted by [TARGET_DIRECTORY].

python generate_funcs_from_modules [SOURCE_FILENAME] [TARGET_DIRECTORY]
python generate_txt_from_python_progs.py [SOURCE_FILE_DIR] [TARGET_DIRECTORY]

Support for more projects will be added in the future

Uninstallation

To remove the manp symlink from /usr/local/bin:

rm /usr/local/bin/manp

or,

unlink /usr/local/bin/manp

Note: If there are permission errors, use sudo. The symlink can be manually deleted as well

Usage

To get documentation for a artifact present in the SOURCE_DIR:

manp [MODULE_OR_FUNCTION_NAME]

Example: (For the default Python std lib documentation)

manp zlib

To display help:

manp -h

To display list of all available documented artifacts:

manp -l

Workflow

A detailed explanation of how the program functions:

The program requires compilation and running of certain files and script before others which is handled by the Makefile.

1. The text_to_raw_string.cpp and raw_string_to_text.cpp modules are compiled before main. The text_to_raw_string.cpp converts all the files inside the SOURCE_DIR folder to manp/target_data/ folder as raw string literal txt files padded with extra CPP_MAP_KEY_VALUE_DELIM and CPP_MAP_MODULE_DELIM (defined in common.h) delimiters for creating C++ maps.

2. After this, the generate_doc_artifacts_list.sh will iterate through the manp/target_data/ folder and create combined_txt_include.h that includes all the txt raw string literal files in one header file and doc_artifacts_list header include file containing just the names of all the modules from the target_data folder.

3. The main.cpp function will finally be compiled along with SpellingCorrector.cpp and manp will be available for execution.

4. Once the manp is added to the PATH var one way or another, it can be used as manp abs.

Developer instructions

• To add documentations manually, txt files with the name of the module in question should be added to the SOURCE_DIR folder and the project should be recompiled.

• To change documentation or source code files back to normal text format, run ./raw_string_to_text data.

Contributions

Acknowledgements

• All documentations imported from the Python Software Foundation Official Documentation https://www.python.org/psf/
• Peter Norvig's How to Write a Spelling Corrector
• Felipe Farinon's C++ implementation of Peter Norvig's Spell Correcter felipe.farinon@gmail.com

Disclaimer

I am not the creator of the SpellingCorrector C++ modules. The SpellingCorrector module used in this project was first written by Peter Norvig in Python and then converted to C++ by Felipe Farinon.