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I'm fairly new to emacs. I'm using OS X 10.10. I have been learning to use helm. I was interested in its integration with surfraw. I installed surfraw from teh source tarball following the instructions at surfraw.alioth.debian.org.

However, when I use helm-surfraw, I originally got a file not found error. Following this discussion, I determined this was partly due to lack of a default browser.

I installed lynx as follows:

sudo mkdir /usr/local/src
cd /usr/local/src
sudo curl -O http://lynx.isc.org/lynx2.8.7/lynx2.8.7.tar.gz
sudo tar -xzvf lynx2.8.7.tar.gz
cd lynx2-8-7
sudo ./configure --mandir=/usr/share/man
sudo make
sudo make install

Then, I did the following:

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/surfraw
$ echo "SURFRAW_text_browser=/usr/local/bin/lynx" >> ~/.config/surfraw/conf
$ echo "SURFRAW_graphical=no" >> ~/.config/surfraw/conf

The good news is that I can now run surfraw from the terminal. However, helm-surfraw still doesn't work. I'm not given any options for a search engine (see screenshot).

I'm interested in helm-surfraw alternatives, but I'd also like to understand what I'm doing wrong.

enter image description here

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  • "However, helm-surfraw still doesn't work." Can you elaborate?
    – nanny
    Jun 22, 2015 at 13:24
  • Yes: "I'm not given any options for a search engine".
    – hartshoj
    Jun 22, 2015 at 22:28

2 Answers 2

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You should try two twings:

  1. Open Terminal and type surfraw -elvi. If you get GLOBAL ELVI: and nothing else go to next step
  2. Install gnu-sed from Mac-Ports. And relink the new gnu-sed with the old one (I think it's located on /usr/bin/sed/)
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  • I didn't realize that Mac-Ports still existed. A quick search of www.macports.org doesn't reveal a gnu-sed though. But why will this help?
    – hartshoj
    Aug 15, 2015 at 19:43
  • Yes sorry, you should download using homebrew . The problem is connected with sed. OSX has a built in sed which is not recognized by surfraw.
    – Enrico Pirani
    Aug 15, 2015 at 20:48
  • OK, got that far. I'm not sure what you mean by 'relink' though. There isn't anything in /usr/bin/sed/, either. There is a binary file sed in /usr/bin/
    – hartshoj
    Aug 16, 2015 at 21:34
  • If you have installed gnu-sed from homebrew you should have two sed files one located in /usr/local/bin/ installed by homebrew (named gsed) and another one in /usr/bin/ which is the one installed by default on OSX (named sed). Now move/rename sed in another location. After that give this command :sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/gnu-sed/4.2.2/bin/gsed /usr/bin/sed.
    – Enrico Pirani
    Aug 17, 2015 at 8:24
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Since you asked for alternatives as well, here are some: try helm-google for general searches and sx or sos for stackexchange searches. sx uses native api. There are other specialized searches, such as helm-dash to search documentation for over 150 APIs. Search for engine or search to a list of packages on MELPA.

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