Thanks for the prompt feedback Philip. On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 03:44 AM, Philip Ganchev said: > > > I used an ugly kludge to print out a list of all the browsers we > > looked for. [...] > Why not use the "column" command?
Because I didn't know it existed. It looks like a much better solution, I will use columns and instead of ls. Thanks. > > I realize I may have gone way overboard with the --verbose and > > --shutup flags. __[...] > Personally, I think the "--verbose", "--quiet" and "--shutup" > options and the "fish_quiet_help" environment variable add > unnecessary complexity. Fish aims to do the right thing without > user intervention, and aims for functionality through > orthogonality and minimal configurability. See > http://fishshell.org/user_doc/design.html Now, I know that we > want to lower the bar as much as possible, especially for the > "help" command. But adding these options does not do that. I > think it's fine to show an info message every time the user > asks for help. Maybe I'm missing some important use cases? Could well be this feature is too un-fish-like to stay in, although I think the complexity problem is more in the UI than in the code. I was running the help command a zillion times and after the first few times the information about which browser was used is unneeded and it was getting very annoying so I added an easy way to turn it off. Also, for me, vertical space in the scrollback buffer can be precious, especially in the virtual consoles when someone doesn't know how to scroll back. I first added -quiet to suppress the now unwanted messages. Then since I was using -q most of the time, I decided to add $fish_quiet_help to turn it off all the time. But that involved editing a config file which then led me to add --verbose and --shutup which change the default behavior without requiring a config file edit. I see it like a verbose "beginner mode" and a quieter "expert mode", like turning off tool tips in a window manager once you know what everything is. If other people agree with you, I'll remove these features, but I'd like to give it a week or so to see if anyone else finds the extra output annoying enough to be worth having a way to turn it off. Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery > The delay is an interesting idea. If we find it's annoying, > maybe a better solution is to have a static help page that has > the message "could not find a topic" at the top? And the help > page would be auto-generated with the usual index page. A third option would be to just display the error message when we don't recognize the help topic/command/etc and not open a browser at all. This would be a good opportunity to give an explanation of tab completion. I think this is the best solution. Speaking of which, there are many valid completions for the first argument to help that are not listed. Basically any command on the system. These come in via this code: if type -f $fish_help_item > /dev/null man $fish_help_item return end I'm not sure what to do about this. Perhaps we could simply add something like: echo "No HTML help available for \"$fish_help_item\", [...]" This would explain why we sometimes open a browser and sometimes display the answer in the terminal window. It also hints at why system commands are valid arguments but don't show up in the completion. If a command has no man page then the user would see: No HTML help available for "$cmd" but $cmd is a valid command on this system. Looking for a manual page via "man $cmd" ... No manual entry for $cmd which explains the otherwise rather cryptic man error message. Peace, James ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Increase Visibility of Your 3D Game App & Earn a Chance To Win $500! Tap into the largest installed PC base & get more eyes on your game by optimizing for Intel(R) Graphics Technology. Get started today with the Intel(R) Software Partner Program. Five $500 cash prizes are up for grabs. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intelisp-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Fish-users mailing list Fish-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fish-users
