Thanks @unixengineer! Glad you got howdoi working behind a proxy. Lots of people install this application through `pip` and `brew` and as such will probably not have the same proxy settings and won't immediately know where to look to edit the code. I would be happy to accept this request if you can make it more general.

@travisby mentioned the HTTP_PROXY/HTTPS_PROXY environment variables. It is my understanding that these variables will be picked up by the requests module without any changes to the howdoi code. Would you give it a try and see if it works?

http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/advanced/ (check the section "Proxies")

<pre>
$ export HTTP_PROXY="10.0.1.100:3128"
$ export HTTPS_PROXY="10.0.1.100:3128"
$ python
>>> import requests
>>> requests.get("https://google.com")
</pre>