msdocviewer is a simple tool for viewing Microsoft's win32 API and driver
technical documentation
msdocviewer consists of two parts. The first is a parser (run_me_first.py)
that searches for all markdown files in the Microsoft
sdk-api and
driver repository,
it then checks if the document is related to a function and if so, it copies
the document to a directory and then renames the file with their corresponding
API name. For example, the file nf-fileapi-createfilea.md is renamed to
CreateFileA.md. The second part is a markdown viewer that exists within an
IDA plugin (ida_plugin/msdocviewida.py) that displays the document in IDA. An
example of the output can be seen below.
msdocviewer is similar to the old MSDN IDA viewers but doesn't rely on
browsers, network requests or extracting the documents from a Visual Studio
SDK. Since Microsoft started storing their API documents in Markdown and
hosting them on GitHub, all the documents can be easily downloaded by cloning a
repository. This is super useful because it is easy to copy the repositories to
a portable drive or have them in a VM or host that doesn't have network access.
It should also make it easy to port this code to other tools (e.g. Binary
Ninja, Ghidra, etc).
The .git log for the sdk-api and driver repository takes up over 2GB of
space. Deleting these files or their downloaded repositories does not affect
the usage of the plugin because all of the needed files are saved to the
apis_md directory.
Clone this repository. Note: Since the repository is using submodules it might take some time to download. The Microsoft sdk-api repository is over 1GB in size.
Use option --shallow-submodules to clone only last tree of repositories with docs
git clone https://github.com/av-gantimurov/msdocsviewer --recursive --shallow-submodules
If sdk-api or windows-driver-docs-ddi are empty, the following commands needs to be executed
cd msdocsviewer
git submodule update --init --recursive --shallow-submodules
If the above command errors out, execute it again.
Once downloaded, execute python run_me_first.py then wait. Below is an example output.
python.exe c:/Users/Admin/Documents/repo/msdocsviewer/run_me_first_copy.py
INFO - deleting and overwriting apis_md directory
INFO - creating apis_md directory at C:\Users\Admin\Documents\repo\msdocsviewer\apis_md
INFO - starting the parsing, this can take a few minutes
INFO - parsing C:\Users\Admin\Documents\repo\msdocsviewer\sdk-api\sdk-api-src\content
INFO - parsing C:\Users\Admin\Documents\repo\msdocsviewer\sdk-api\sdk-api-src\content completed
INFO - parsing C:\Users\Admin\Documents\repo\msdocsviewer\windows-driver-docs-ddi\wdk-ddi-src\content
INFO - parsing C:\Users\Admin\Documents\repo\msdocsviewer\windows-driver-docs-ddi\wdk-ddi-src\content completed
INFO - finished parsing, if using IDA add path C:\Users\Admin\Documents\repo\msdocsviewer\apis_md to API_MD variable in idaplugin/msdocviewida.py
To update (recommended) the documention, execute the following command
python.exe c:/Users/Admin/Documents/repo/msdocsviewer/run_me_first_copy.py --overwrite
There is also an option of --log to create a debug log to see all skipped
files. Here is the help for run_me_first_copy
usage: run_me_first_copy.py [-h] [-l] [-o]
msdocviewer parser component
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-l, --log Log all parsing errors to debug-parser.log
-o, --overwrite overwrite apis_md directory
Edit ida_plugin/msdocviewida.py and add the directory path of apis_md to
the API_MD variable (currently on line 19ish). Then copy msdocviewida.py to
the IDA plugin directory. The following idapython command can be executed to
find the plugin directory path.
Python>import ida_diskio
Python>ida_diskio.get_user_idadir()
'C:\\Users\\Admin\\AppData\\Roaming\\Hex-Rays\\IDA Pro'
If a directory named plugins is not present, it needs to be created.
pyaml - strangely the yaml data can also be parsed as a markdown table
tqdm - show progress bar while parsing documentation
- Port the plugin to Binary Ninja