rfsee

Search and view RFCs in Neovim and from the terminal. A TF-IDF index is built on the contents of all RFCs from the IETF and then saved locally in a JSON file. A CLI app and NeoVim plugin are provided for searching this index. In the future additional clients may be provided.

Project Goals

I had three goals for this project at the offset.

1. Build something useful, that I hope to make use of in my day to day work
2. Make use of FFI with Rust
3. Build a high quality and performant project from scratch with only the minimal number of dependencies.

For point 3, I intend for the only dependency of this project to be a TLS library for making HTTPS calls (and potentially a JSON serialization library). The initial release of this project will not have achieved that goal yet - but I plan to get there.

Some of the custom components that were created:

1. An HTTP client
2. A threadpool (largely copied from the Rust Book)
3. A TF-IDF index

And some of the planned components:

1. A text extractor / parser (currently using regex)
2. A custom serialization format (currently using simdjson)
3. An async runtime

I time boxed my work on this project to the spare hour or two I had each day (which I normally spend on work separate but related to my job) during the month of December 2024. Moving forward I expect to delegate work on this project to a weekends / as I have time.

Install

Terminal

Currently the CLI app can only be installed with cargo.

NeoVim

With Lazy

{
    'matthewmturner/rfsee',
    opts = {},
    dependencies = {
        "nvim-lua/plenary.nvim"
    },
}

Getting Started

After installing, you can run the following to create the index.

Terminal

rfsee index

Then, to execute a query its as simple as

rfsee search --terms MY_SEARCH_TERMS

NeoVim

:RFSeeIndex

Then, to execute a query its as simple as

:RFSee MY_SEARCH_TERMS

The above will open a new buffer with the results from your search. You can navigate up and down and then press <Enter> on a line to open that RFC in your browser. In the future this will open the selected RFC in NeoVim.

Contributing

This is a personal project that I am using to explore and learn to build an application with minimal dependencies - as such I will likely not be accepting outside contributions. That being said bug reports are always welcome.