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ScalaReplDocCommands

This is a little “proof of concept” (POC) or MVP candidate to see if having commands like these to view Scaladoc and Scala source code in the REPL would be good:

Command Description
doc("List") show the List class Scaladoc
doc("List", "withFilter") grep for withFilter in the methods of the List Scaladoc
src("Vector") show the source code for the Vector class
browser("LazyList") open the LazyList class Scaladoc in the default browser
editor("Vector") open the Vector class in your default ".txt" editor

Note that the open command currently only works on MacOS systems, because it requires a little bit of AppleScript code to open the default browser on a Mac system.

This little project was inspired by a Gitter discussion that started here and ended here.

Disclaimer

Most of this code is written in a “worst practices” style because I just want to see if a tool like this is worth developing, so I’ve taken a lot of shortcuts, and often don’t handle possible errors.

Configuration

The following commands should work on Mac and Unix/Linux systems.

Once you create a JAR file with sbt assembly, follow these steps:

  • Create a /Users/al/tmp directory (change this to match a directory on your system)
  • Copy the JAR file to that directory (the JAR is currently named ScalaReplDocCommands-assembly-0.2.jar)
  • Create a file named repl-commands in that directory
  • Put this content in that file:
import com.alvinalexander.repl_docs.ReplDocCommands._
  • Create an alias to start the REPL:
alias repl="scala -cp ScalaReplDocCommands-assembly-0.2.jar -i _/Users/al/tmp/repl-commands_"
  • Then start the REPL with that alias:
$ repl

Inside the REPL, use the help, doc, src, open, and editor commands shown above.

Discussion

As mentioned, I created this as a POC/MVP candidate to see if this is a good idea. The easiest way for me to do this was to get the docs off the internet, from URLs like this one:

Everything after that is screen-scraping with Jsoup. A much better (i.e., real) implementation would probably read from the source code JAR files. But, this was much easier for me to do quickly.

Jsoup

Some useful Jsoup URLs: