On 8/13/06, Martin Baehr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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!
That's bad. What's worse is that it's extremely difficult to work around on the fish-side. > > 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. You are not the first to comment on the fact that it feels weird that the shell launches new windows like this, and I agree. The reason why fish doesn't use man-pages is simple: hyperlinks. Having hyperlinks in the documentation enables the reader to quickly move between related subjects to find the section he/she is looking for, which I think is a very large benefit, bigger than all the associated downsides. I chose html pages instead of info-pages because I generally don't like the info readers that exist on most systems. Also, while I belive e.g. Konqueror can render info-pages nicely these days, there are also a great many systems that only have the info command, if even that. As Frederik pointed out, you can customize which browser is used using e.g. 'set -U BROWSER links', so this should not be a major problem. This is documented in the help section for the help command, which can be found by typing 'help help'. Using something like 'echo "help is being displayed in a window of" $i' is a great idea. The only problem with this is that fish first tries to find the commands 'x-www-browser' and 'htmlview', which are programs that in turn start the user-configurable default browser. This of course means that most of the time, fish has no idea what browser is used to display the help. I guess in that case, one simply writes 'help is being displayed in a window of your default browser' or something like that. > > 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/ -- Axel ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
