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I was thinking about a way to improve open source developper experience, and I tought that it would be nice to have some sort of heavily configurable and searchable documentation. This tool would support configurable list of "knowledge source" that can be setup on startup.

You could imagine many usages for this tool (that I called metaHelp), for example, it can be ran by any IDE (emacs, anjuta, eclipse, kdevelop ...) and configured on startup to query sources related to the development being done, so for example, if I am working on a python application, the IDE will setup metaHelp to lookup sources related to python such as ASPN cookbooks, python manual pages, python references, pydoc service ...

To better explain this, I made a small proof of concept, that can be downloaded from this page.

This proof of concept support two "knowledge source" types : Web and Man pages, and can be easily extended using plugins :)

The configuration is done using the metaHelp.cfg file, and it can be used either as a command line tool (metaHelp.py) or with a gtk+ interface (gmetaHelp.py).

a screenshot showing metaHelp displaying a result page.