Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Daniel Martín]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> A week or two ago I was actually looking at Emacs help code. I wanted to bring
> in the source code as well as references into help lookup, but honestly, I 
> would
> rather prefer to just include helpful instead of re-implementing everything. 
> If
> the authors have signed the paperwork, I see no reason why not just include
> it. Also original help lookup could be left as low-resource, faster solution 
> for
> people who prefer to spend less resources on help lookup, while helpful could 
> be
> enabled by a custom variable, something like show extended help or as
> a minor mode.

Instead of integrating the library as a whole, I'd prefer we extract
those features from Helpful that people think are useful and not already
available in Emacs.  I don't think that having two separate help systems
in core is a good idea, there'll be too much duplication and maintenance
burden.

Showing references to a symbol is an interesting feature (for example,
to learn how to use an ELisp API by looking at examples).  I see that
Helpful provides this feature via the separate package elisp-refs
(https://github.com/Wilfred/elisp-refs).  The closest package I know
that actually understands ELisp is el-search from ELPA, but elisp-refs
is a more specific package for the concrete use case of searching for
references.

If we can get copyright papers, perhaps we could start by integrating
the functionality of elisp-refs as an xref backend.  Then the help
system could use the new backend to provide a "References" link button.