Re: [ jEdit-users ] Improved help system?

[Reinout v. S. <re...@gm...>]

Hi Barry,

2005/9/27, Barry Hemphill <ub...@fa...>:

> automatically integrated. The problem is the help viewer itself - it's
> just awful. I don't mean to be nasty but it is effectively an XML/HTML
> based help system, but rather than just taking advantage of whatever
> default browser you happen to use on your system, it has it's own very
> browser with unfortunately very minimal functionality. The search is
> half effective
(...)
> Anyway, what about simply switching to using a standard web browser? It
> would still be possible to have a table of contents, search, etc., and
> we could use the more powerful modern web browser (Firefox, Safari, IE)
> without relying on jEdit developers to add facilities - I for one would
> love to be able to use tabs to open multiple help pages at once.

To be honest, I don't think that's such a good idea. In the first
place, to keep the search facility and  use it from a webbrowser,
you'd have to run some sort of local daemon/background process to
handle the queries. Secondly, you do know that you can access the help
contents with your favourite web browser right now, don't you?

If there's going to be a change in the help system I would back a
solution that would take advantage of the underlying system's help
browsing facilities. However this would require different, most likely
mutually incompatible approaches depending on the platform. The
current solution is not so bad.

> we could use the more powerful modern web browser (Firefox, Safari, IE)

Just for fun, try clicking Help > Contents in your web browser. Note
that it brings up a help browser UI, and doesn't show the help text in
the browser window itself. Ever wonder why that is?

regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen