ErwinDB

A TUI for browsing Erwin Brandstetter's Stack Overflow Q&A content.

Why Erwin's Answers?

Erwin Brandstetter is a PostgreSQL consultant with ~670k reputation and ~7k answers on Stack Overflow.

I’ve lost count of how often a PostgreSQL search has brought me to an Erwin Brandstetter response on Stack Overflow. His answers are reliably thorough and exceptionally clear, and studying them has played a meaningful role in my development as an engineer.

When answering questions, he typically:

• Links to and quotes the PostgreSQL manual, showing you exactly where features are documented
• Notes which features work in which Postgres versions, and updates old answers when new versions add capabilities
• Addresses edge cases you wouldn't think of, like NULL handling, concurrency, race conditions
• Benchmarks multiple approaches with actual timing results

Why This App?

ErwinDB lets you browse Erwin Brandstetter's answers offline and search them quickly from a TUI. It includes semantic search, syntax highlighting, one-key opening of links in your external browser, and an "Erwin mode" that prominently highlights his posts.

Installation

Cargo

cargo install erwindb

Homebrew

brew install ahacop/tap/erwindb

Nix

nix run github:ahacop/erwindb
# or
nix profile install github:ahacop/erwindb

From source

git clone https://github.com/ahacop/erwindb
cd erwindb
cargo build --release

Features

• Browse questions that Erwin Brandstetter has answered, with vim-style navigation
• Fuzzy search on question titles
• Semantic search using ML embeddings
• Syntax-highlighted code blocks
• Dual-pane view (question + Erwin's answer side-by-side on wide terminals)

Keyboard Shortcuts

Question List

Key	Action
j / ↓	Move down
k / ↑	Move up
g	Go to top
G	Go to bottom
Space	Page down
Ctrl+d	Half page down
Ctrl+u	Half page up
Enter	View question
/	Fuzzy search
?	Semantic search
Esc	Clear search
1-5	Sort by column (ID, Date, Score, Views, Answers)
o	Open in browser
q	Quit

Question Detail

Key	Action
j / ↓	Scroll down
k / ↑	Scroll up
g	Go to top
G	Go to bottom
Space / d	Page down
u	Page up
e	Cycle to next Erwin answer / toggle Erwin pane
E	Cycle to previous Erwin answer
Tab	Focus next link
Shift+Tab	Focus previous link
o	Open focused link or question in browser
q / b	Back to list

Demos

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/cfce1543-0bd4-4c2b-95bd-8016697f5066

Fuzzy Search

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5c4ca875-0e30-43dd-ae5f-11e18f4e4a9a

Semantic Search

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/94498e07-3751-4d7c-b2ec-d4280486bfcd

Erwin Mode

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/77c4752b-bd65-45b6-9cf3-0f859f595ccd

Development

cargo build              # Debug build
cargo build --release    # Optimized build
cargo run                # Run the application
cargo fmt                # Format code
cargo clippy             # Lint checks

Releasing

./scripts/release        # Bump patch version (0.9.4 -> 0.9.5)
./scripts/release 1.0.0  # Set specific version

git push origin main --tags  # Trigger release workflow

License

This project has two separate licenses:

• Code (TUI, scraper, utilities): GNU General Public License v3.0
• Data (Stack Overflow content in the database): CC BY-SA - content from Stack Overflow is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, with the specific version (2.5, 3.0, or 4.0) depending on when it was originally posted