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Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts
From: |
Stefan Reichör |
Subject: |
Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts |
Date: |
Mon, 19 Apr 2004 09:51:47 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.110002 (No Gnus v0.2) Emacs/21.3.50 (berkeley-unix) |
Hi Richard!
> The doc string is supposed to describe the arguments, so it is more
> useful than no help.
>
> That is true--but its description of the arguments is often not
> very helpful for a situation like this.
>
> Here is a new idea. We can develop a convention for delimiting, in
> the doc string, the help about each argument. Then the help facility
> for entering an argument could look thru the doc string for the part
> that refers to the current argument.
That is a nice idea. Here are my thoughts:
* Often you are prompted for an argument in the minibuffer.
- A specific help for this argument would be sometimes very nice,
because the prompt is to short to provide all the information
- Often you want to about the function that is actually in progress
You want to get the "big picture". In this case the whole
documentation would be nicer.
* The convention for delimiting the doc strings would require a
rewrite of many docstrings.
Many source code documentation tools solve it by putting an extra
\param section for every parameter.
* Look at the following (randomly) choosen functions and their documentations:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
grep-find is an interactive autoloaded Lisp function in `grep'.
(grep-find COMMAND-ARGS)
Run grep via find, with user-specified args COMMAND-ARGS.
Collect output in a buffer.
While find runs asynchronously, you can use the C-x ` command
to find the text that grep hits refer to.
This command uses a special history list for its arguments, so you can
easily repeat a find command.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
find-dired is an interactive autoloaded Lisp function in `find-dired'.
(find-dired DIR ARGS)
Run `find' and go into Dired mode on a buffer of the output.
The command run (after changing into DIR) is
find . \( ARGS \) -ls
except that the variable `find-ls-option' specifies what to use
as the final argument.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Consider the find-dired example. When asked for dir or args
I would like to get the whole docstring, because it covers the things
I need to know.
I am not sure about the benefit of stripping the information down for
every argument.
--
Stefan.
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, (continued)
Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Masatake YAMATO, 2004/04/13
Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Richard Stallman, 2004/04/14
Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Richard Stallman, 2004/04/14
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Stefan Reichör, 2004/04/15
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Richard Stallman, 2004/04/16
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Kim F. Storm, 2004/04/16
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Richard Stallman, 2004/04/17
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts,
Stefan Reichör <=
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Kim F. Storm, 2004/04/19
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Juanma Barranquero, 2004/04/29
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Stefan Reichör, 2004/04/30
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Juanma Barranquero, 2004/04/30
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Kim F. Storm, 2004/04/30
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Juanma Barranquero, 2004/04/30
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Kim F. Storm, 2004/04/30
- Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Juanma Barranquero, 2004/04/30
Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Stefan Monnier, 2004/04/30
Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts, Juanma Barranquero, 2004/04/30