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ngmcp

ngmcp is an MCP server that exposes Norton Guide database files to AI agents. It is built on top of the ngdb library and uses fastmcp as its MCP framework.

Norton Guides are a classic hypertext help-file format from the DOS era, used widely for Clipper and similar tool documentation.

Installation

NGMCP requires Python 3.12 or later.

Using uv (recommended)

The fastest and most modern way to install NGMCP is with uv:

uv tool install ngmcp

If you don't have uv installed you can use uvx.sh to perform the installation. For GNU/Linux or macOS or similar:

curl -LsSf uvx.sh/ngmcp/install.sh | sh

or on Windows:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://uvx.sh/ngmcp/install.ps1 | iex"

Using pipx

pipx install ngmcp

Configuration

How you configure your agent to use the server will depend on the agent you're using. Generally the configuration to use will be:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ngmcp": {
      "command": "ngmcp",
      "args": [],
      "env": {
        "NGMCP_GUIDE_DIRS": "/path/to/your/ng/files"
      }
    }
  }
}

[!note] Adjust the command and args depending on your installation method.

Configuration

Environment variable Default Description
NGMCP_GUIDE_DIRS (none) Colon-separated list of directories to search for .ng files
NGMCP_ALLOW_ABSOLUTE_PATHS false Allow tools to open .ng files by absolute path

Available Tools

Tool Description
get_guide_info Title, credits, magic, made_with, menu count, and file size
list_menus Menu structure: title and prompt list for each menu
list_entries All entries with type, offset, line count, and first line of text
read_entry Full plain-text content of the entry at a given offset
read_entry_source Full plain-text Norton Guide source content of the entry at a given offset
follow_link Follow a short-entry link to the target long entry
line_search_guide Line-oriented full-text search through all entries
body_search_guide Full-body-oriented full-text search through all entries
list_guide_files .ng files in the configured guide directories

Hacking

See Contributing.md.

git clone https://github.com/davep/ngmcp
cd ngmcp
make setup
make checkall

Release files for ngmcp 0.2.0

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for ngmcp 0.2.0
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Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for ngmcp 0.2.0
File Interpreter ABI Platform
ngmcp-0.2.0-py3-none-any.whl Python 3 none any Details

Total release size: 25.1 kB

Release files / ngmcp-0.2.0.tar.gz

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Release files / ngmcp-0.2.0-py3-none-any.whl

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0.2.0 This release

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