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