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

demo.mp4 Fuzzy Search search.mp4 Semantic Search semantic-search.mp4 Erwin Mode erwin-mode.mp4

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