Álvaro Ramírez

21 February 2022 Emacs: Fuzzy search Apple's online docs

When building software for the Apple ecosystem, Xcode is often the editor of choice. With Emacs being my personal preference, I rarely find other iOS devs with a similar mindset.

When I saw Mikael Konradsson's post describing his Emacs Swift development setup, I reached out to say hello. While exchanging tips and tricks, the topic of searching Apple's docs came up. It had been a while since I looked into this, so it was a great reminder to revisit the space.

Back in June 2020, I wrote a snippet to fuzzy search hackingwithswift.com, using Emacs's ivy completion framework. With a similar online API, we could also search Apple's docs. Turns out, there is and we can we can use it to search developer.apple.com from our beloved editor.

;;; counsel-apple-search.el -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

(defun ar/counsel-apple-search ()
  "Ivy interface for dynamically querying apple.com docs."
  (interactive)
  (require 'request)
  (require 'json)
  (require 'url-http)
  (ivy-read "apple docs: "
            (lambda (input)
              (let* ((url (url-encode-url (format "https://developer.apple.com/search/search_data.php?q=%s" input)))
                     (c1-width (round (* (- (window-width) 9) 0.3)))
                     (c2-width (round (* (- (window-width) 9) 0.5)))
                     (c3-width (- (window-width) 9 c1-width c2-width)))
                (or
                 (ivy-more-chars)
                 (let ((request-curl-options (list "-H" (string-trim (url-http-user-agent-string)))))
                   (request url
                     :type "GET"
                     :parser 'json-read
                     :success (cl-function
                               (lambda (&key data &allow-other-keys)
                                 (ivy-update-candidates
                                  (mapcar (lambda (item)
                                            (let-alist item
                                              (propertize
                                               (format "%s   %s   %s"
                                                       (truncate-string-to-width (propertize (or .title "")
                                                                                             'face '(:foreground "yellow")) c1-width nil ?\s "…")
                                                       (truncate-string-to-width (or .description "") c2-width nil ?\s "…")
                                                       (truncate-string-to-width (propertize (string-join (or .api_ref_data.languages "") "/")
                                                                                             'face '(:foreground "cyan1")) c3-width nil ?\s "…"))
                                               'url .url)))
                                          (cdr (car data)))))))
                   0))))
            :action (lambda (selection)
                      (browse-url (concat "https://developer.apple.com"
                                          (get-text-property 0 'url selection))))
            :dynamic-collection t
            :caller 'ar/counsel-apple-search))

index rss	mastodon twitter github linkedin email
	Álvaro Ramírez sponsor