yarn search

[jdalton]

There's currently an npm search which isn't so great. What do you all think of having yarn search which is a shortcut for opening https://npms.io/search?q=<search-string> using npms.io.

\@atduarte @satazor

[tony19]

@jdalton Instead of opening a browser window/tab, I think yarn search should list the search results in the CLI perhaps using the npms API. We might also need a way to search for Bower dependencies.

[Daniel15]

I think yarn search should list the search results in the CLI perhaps using the npms API.

I wonder whether that's worth the maintenance cost, given the site already exists. In general, for something like this where you want to search and browse through a listing or collection of things, a rich graphical interface like a website is always going to provide a better user experience than a CLI app.

[tony19]

In general, for something like this where you want to search and browse through a listing or collection of things, a rich graphical interface like a website is always going to provide a better user experience than a CLI app.

I think that's somewhat subjective and probably depends on the amount of data presented. Plus, there's already a precedence for CLI-only results (i.e., bower search and npm search).

[sebmck]

We've deliberately decided not to add these sorts of commands to Yarn. There's a lot of them that don't actually see much use and the maintenance burden isn't really worth it. If the functionality of the commands is so simple (just opening a browser) then you can just do it yourself. Thanks for the report!

[jdalton]

Ya, mainly wanted to show some :heart: for npms.io and figured yarn integration via opening a browser to a given search would help (yarn improving pkg installs & npms.io improving search).

Related to https://twitter.com/mrmrs_/status/763481520791232512.

[satazor]

@jdalton Thank you, it's an honour to have such an important member of the community suggesting npms.io. I tend to agree with @kittens, but if this project gets enough traction to actually "replace" npm (like lodash effectively replaced underscore for most devs), I think it's reasonable to have a search functionality. Many many developers still prefer to do these kind of tasks from the console. If you look at https://github.com/npms-io, the npms-cli repo has more stars than npms-www.

[iarna]

FYI, we've documented our new search API (that builds on the npms.io folks work) over here, if you ever decide you want to fold that in.

[robclancy]

Lol is this for real? Such a big maintenance burden to dump search results from an API.

[mika76]

Personally I think this would be a great function. Why would I have to go all the way to the browser, open a specific page, search, copy paste a name of a package into the terminal I just came from, when all I wanted was to check what the exact name of the package for "bootswatch" was so I could run yarn add on it?

I vote for this function 👍

[denizdogan]

For what it's worth, npms.io has a CLI which you can install using yarn global add npms-cli and then use like npms search foobar.

That being said, I do think that Yarn deserves its own built-in search. I can't imagine that it would lead to much maintenance work, it's a very simple function in comparison to the rest of Yarn.

[vinilios]

@denizdogan npms package has nothing to do with npms website. Please modify your post with the correct package name npms-cli.

[denizdogan]

@vinilios Oops, fixed

[maticzav]

Hey 👋 I ran over this issue and created Emma CLI. I would love to get some feedback! 🙂

http://github.com/maticzav/emma-cli

[danvk]

If you're specifically interested in packages with TypeScript type declarations, there's [dtsearch]:

$ npx dtsearch sprintf
   DLS NAME              TYPES             DESCRIPTION
533.3k sprintf           @types/sprintf    sprintf() for node.js
 47.4m sprintf-js        @types/sprintf-js JavaScript sprintf implementation
 82.9m extsprintf        @types/extsprintf extended POSIX-style sprintf
  2.1m ssf               <bundled>         Format data using ECMA-376 spreadsheet Format Codes
  1.6m printj            <bundled>         Pure-JS printf
  123k voca              @types/voca       The ultimate JavaScript string library
746.4k printf            <bundled>         Full implementation of the `printf` family in pure JS.
  1.5k sprintfjs         <bundled>         POSIX sprintf(3)-style String Formatting for JavaScript
   169 @jitesoft/sprintf <bundled>         sprintf function for javascript.
    94 stringd           <bundled>         A string variable parser for JavaScript

It uses the same Algolia search as yarnpkg.com. It's geared towards TS users but can search all npm packages with a flag (-u).