At Sat, 25 Jun 2011 04:13:32 -0400, Neil Van Dyke wrote: > 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
It would be nice to make `help' faster. Most of the time is loading the cross-reference files for all installed documents. Since each document has its own cross-reference file, it might be a lot faster to have some lighter-weight index from module+name pairs to cross-reference files, so that only one cross-reference file needs to be loaded for a typical query. That's definitely a change in guts of `raco setup' (but probably no change to Scribble). > 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. It seems like it shouldn't be too hard to tell the search page to jump to a first hit automatically (i.e., you're feeling lucky) --- a relatively small matter of Javascript programming, I imagine. > 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). Since the installation's cross-reference is in a format that is not especially friendly to Emacs of Javascript, here are some pointers if you consider writing a translator: * Use `load-collections-xref' from `setup/xref' to load all cross-reference information. * Use `xref-index' from `scribble/xref' to get a list of index entries, where the `desc' field in the result lets you know which ones correspond to documentation for a binding. Use `xref-tag->path+anchor' to map an entry's tag to a URL. I imagine that you're run the translator once per installation, but you'd also want to run after a planet package installation, too. At Sat, 25 Jun 2011 04:20:18 -0400, Neil Van Dyke wrote: > Forgot to mention: I could also use quick-reference information of > procedure/macro syntax/args in Emacs, for displaying in echo area or > tooltip as you're editing a use of the procedure/macro. Originally, I imagined that the cross-reference information would include some form of the information that appears in a blue box in the manual, but I never got around to that. Currently, the information is only in the rendered documentation. _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
