google-codesearch from vim

I just saw vim hint 1354 pop up in my RSS feed. It’s a neat idea… but it’s hard to decide what documentation should be looked up. Simply using the file type is insufficient.

It turns out that it’s a lot more awesome to do google codesearch lookup on it.

function! OnlineDoc() let s:browser = “firefox” let s:wordUnderCursor = expand("")

        if &ft == "cpp" || &ft == "c" || &ft == "ruby" || &ft == "php" || &ft == "python"
            let s:url = "http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=".s:wordUnderCursor."+lang:".&ft
        elseif &ft == "vim"
            let s:url = "http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=".s:wordUnderCursor
        else
            return
        endif

        let s:cmd = "silent !" . s:browser . " " . s:url
        execute  s:cmd
        redraw!
    endfunction

    " online doc search
    map <LocalLeader>k :call OnlineDoc()<CR>

My <LocalLeader> is mapped to a coma; see my .vimrc for details. I use ,k as my codesearch shortcut because I already use K to look up man pages… so I will be less likely to forget this one.

NOTE: I was informed by Blake Akers, of Webology, that this snippet doesn’t work since Google CodeSearch was abandoned in 2011. Please refer to History of Google CodeSearch for an alternative: codesearch.com.