This is fantastic all around. The visual design is perfect, it's fast, and within a minute of using it I discovered some new libraries which might be useful for my projects. It reminds me a bit of using Google search when it first launched and was less cluttered.
The clear layout makes it easy enough to mentally filter out common packages which appear in every search result, like gulp and grunt, but it might be a nice bonus to highlight packages that are "most uniquely" associated with the search term and not used by everyone else, or to cluster tools which are alternatives to each other together (e.g. putting gulp and grunt side by side on the same line).
Yeah I noticed it would be useful to cluster related packages together, that was the thinking behind introducing the filters to the right-hand side e.g. framework, test etc. When you click them it will toggle the view.
I was hoping I could rely on the keywords associated with the package to cluster them, though as it turns there's not a lot of love for the keywords section, meaning clustering them would take manual effort. Doing it myself isn't feasible and I though about creating the means for users to contribute the info, just wanted to wait for demand for it first :).
It would be great if the URL reflected the search results. I used your suggested "express" search but after getting the results the URL remains http://www.npmdiscover.com That makes sharing results with someone else or bookmarking fairly awkward.
That being said, kudos for providing a resource that helps wade through all the npm packages out there!
Also: When searching for packages, I recommend http://npmsearch.com. It scores search results by popularity, which usually correlates with quality and maturity.
This is a nice concept. When I start using a new library or framework I very often want to know what the best practices are. Seeing what else I "should" use is a step towards that.
You're right, at the moment I treat both dependencies and devDependencies the same, it made sense just to get an idea of what people were using, though a nice feature would be to differentiate between them. Thanks!
Maybe make it say "of xyz projects on github, foo% use " then a colon or an ellipse. Just a little suggestion rather than putting the first item in the dependency list and "etc".
Yeah I did think about this, however after looking at https://www.npmjs.com/ I felt their 'packages people npm install a lot' kind of satisfied that criteria.
I could put something along the lines of 'Top 10 most discovered packages' based on data from the site :)
what npm packages compete with each other would be nice.
It would be interesting(not saying useful, just interesting) to have something that was similar to TF-IDF for code.
That would argue that everyone uses Express actually makes express not that meaningful.
Of course that would assume that the concept of meaningfulness in text could transfer easily to meaningfulness in a software project, even though that is an area where I have never heard the concept broached.
The clear layout makes it easy enough to mentally filter out common packages which appear in every search result, like gulp and grunt, but it might be a nice bonus to highlight packages that are "most uniquely" associated with the search term and not used by everyone else, or to cluster tools which are alternatives to each other together (e.g. putting gulp and grunt side by side on the same line).