Status: New Owner: ---- Labels: Type-Defect Priority-Medium New issue 253 by aleks.dimitrov: Online Help System http://code.google.com/p/yi-editor/issues/detail?id=253
This is an issue which has been discussed already on the mailing list. As per Jean-Philippe's request, I'm putting it on the tracker, so we can make it easier to follow progress, and/or opinions. This is similar to #249, albeit a bit more general. I'm proposing the following enhancement: We need an online help system, similar to Emacs' C-h and Vim's :help. I do not think that it would be a good idea to use haddock strings and/or let functions self-document directly in the code. (below is some text copied from an earlier email to the list) Vim (and Emacs, I think) come with a special editor mode for documentation. That means, there are some plain text files, which follow a certain markup standard, and are indexed by the editor's online help system. When you search for something, the editor opens up the relevant file in a new buffer, at the relevant line, and maybe highlights what you've been looking for. In Vim at least, (I wouldn't know about Emacs) it also works this way for simple things like `gq` or `G`; i.e. everything is documented that way. This decoupling of functionality/documentation certainly has its drawbacks, but I think it's overall a good idea. I think people should be able to work on the docs without even looking at the code. Of course this method will place us in danger of the typical docs/code race, but that's always the case when you add documentation: keeping the docs up-to-date becomes a major issue. Some ideas for a realization: - use markdown for the documentation since it's widely known and rather easy to parse. We'd have to use a subset of md, since a terminal can't show all the possible markups. I'm mainly thinking about code samples and links. Using the pandoc package, we could even optionally display the help as html pages in the browser. - create a syntax mode for those help files, that allows the user to jump on links, similar to Vim's help system or info pages. - create an indexing system (is there some haskell package that already does that?) and make it searchable via some function. I think that for the two most popular key maps (Emacs and Vim), we could just reuse the native docs of the respective editor, since Yi's behaviour is largely similar. -- You received this message because you are listed in the owner or CC fields of this issue, or because you starred this issue. You may adjust your issue notification preferences at: http://code.google.com/hosting/settings --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Yi development mailing list yi-devel@googlegroups.com http://groups.google.com/group/yi-devel -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
