On Sun, Aug 13, 2006 at 10:11:42PM +0200, Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen wrote: > As far as I can tell is "help" simply a call to "$BROWSER > /path/to/helpfile", and as such won't work is the BROWSER > environmental variable isn't set.
that's it, thanks. on closer inspection, that helps, but the problem is elsewhere: the help function helpfully detects that i have am running in X11 and is using a graphical browser to display the page. unfortunately, that browser is on a different desktop, so i never saw it! this should not happen. if i run a command in a shell, i expect the results to be in the shell as well, unless i explicitly send them elsewhere. (if i wanted to use my graphical browser to look at the help i would go there first. ok, maybe not, i can see the value of being able to use tab completion and all that to pick the command and still have the help displayed in a nice graphical window, but in the name of discoverability, have help output a message that this is what's happening, so that those. a simple echo "help is being displayed in a window of" $i which i just added to my copy should do.) in the long run it would be even nicer if the help pages were in the same format as manpages and could use the man+pager tools to be displayed. then one would not need to have a browser installed. since help already does call man if i run it on an external command (which is quite nice), this would help to seamlessly integrate builtins with external commands. using one format for all documentation also fits the goal of simplicity and minimalism. greetings, martin. -- cooperative communication with sTeam - caudium, pike, roxen and unix offering: programming, training and administration - anywhere in the world -- pike programmer travelling and working in europe open-steam.org unix system- bahai.or.at iaeste.(tuwien.ac|or).at administrator (caudium|gotpike).org is.schon.org Martin Bähr http://www.iaeste.or.at/~mbaehr/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Fish-users mailing list Fish-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fish-users
