If I'm in Emacs, and I have a symbol for some Racket standard library
procedure or syntax, and I want to get the URL (or open the URL in
browser) for the documentation for that symbol... what is a good and
fast way to do that?
Ideas I've considered so far:
1. Use "racket/help". I don't want to do this, since I'd really prefer
not to keep a "racket" process open for this purpose, and invoking
"racket" each time is uncomfortably slow. (As the below timings show,
the "help" macro is not very fast: on my 2GHz dual-core (with no swap),
when the pertinent files *are* cached by Linux, getting the URL takes
about 2.6 seconds. When caches are empty except for what is needed to
start the "racket" process, getting the URL takes about 15.6 seconds.
Looking up *subsequent* symbols in the same "racket" process takes only
around 0.2 seconds, however.)
2. Keep a "racket" process open and use some lookup of my own design.
I'm guessing this is the same as "racket/help", and so I have the same
objections.
3. Have Emacs find the appropriate "index.html" on the filesystem or on
"racket-lang.org", and then send a URL to that with the "q" query
parameter for my symbol, letting the JS look up the documentation, and
waiting for the JS the first time. This will at least get me a list of
search hits, but won't jump to the documentation for the exact symbol.
4. Have Emacs load the documentation indexes (perhaps in the background
when idle, at startup, and when we notice they change) and do the lookup
in Emacs. This is what Quack did for older PLT documentation, and it
stopped working when the documentation format changed and I didn't have
time to rewrite. I could also be sensitive about things like which
"#lang" we were in (like I could with an external process, if I passed
it the "#lang" information).
Any more ideas/thoughts? (Other than pressing me on why I'd rather not
keep a "racket" process open for this purpose. Eventually the new Emacs
mode, Meow, will probably do that for things like Check Syntax, but I
don't want to go there yet if I don't have to.)
Note that all these require some notion of *from which Racket install
tree or which Racket version on the Web do you want this documentation*,
and that's some HCI and coding work that has to be done in any case.
---- BEGIN ----
~ echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
3
~ echo '(display "hello, world!\n")' | racket
Welcome to Racket v5.1.1.
> hello, world!
>
~ time echo "(help begin)" | racket
Welcome to Racket v5.1.1.
> Loading help index...
Sending to web browser...
file: /usr/local/racket-5.1.1/share/racket/doc/reference/begin.html
anchor: (form._((quote._~23~25kernel)._begin))
Starting Firefox...
>
real 0m15.584s
user 0m2.472s
sys 0m0.180s
~ time echo "(help begin)" | racket
Welcome to Racket v5.1.1.
> Loading help index...
Sending to web browser...
file: /usr/local/racket-5.1.1/share/racket/doc/reference/begin.html
anchor: (form._((quote._~23~25kernel)._begin))
Starting Firefox...
>
real 0m2.622s
user 0m2.240s
sys 0m0.124s
~ time echo "(begin (help and) (help or))" | racket
Welcome to Racket v5.1.1.
> Loading help index...
Sending to web browser...
file: /usr/local/racket-5.1.1/share/racket/doc/reference/if.html
anchor: (form._((lib._racket/private/letstx-scheme..rkt)._and))
Starting Firefox...
Sending to web browser...
file: /usr/local/racket-5.1.1/share/racket/doc/reference/if.html
anchor: (form._((lib._racket/private/letstx-scheme..rkt)._or))
Starting Firefox...
>
real 0m2.858s
user 0m2.216s
sys 0m0.116s
~
---- END ----
--
http://www.neilvandyke.org/
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