On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:53 AM, kcrisman <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> > question 2. When we want help about some commands, it asks to type '?' at
>> > the end of that command. For example to know about interact command, it is
>> > asked to type "interact?"..
>> > when I type this and when i press enter key, it shows the entire help
>> > documentation of interact and at the end of the documentation it shows
>> > <END>. I don't know, how to again get back into SAGE prompt.
>>
>> Press q.
>>
>
> Thanks for forwarding this, William.  I've often wondered how newbies
> would know this as well.  Somehow I "just knew" it when I started
> using Sage, but of course I mostly used the notebook at first, like
> many new users.  Should we hack less (or more or whatever ? uses) to
> include some message?

It is pretty amazing how incredibly non-newbie-friendly less and more are.

We could change ipython or the docstring so it includes a hint at the
end of the message, which would make it so we don't have to hack the
pager (less), so at least the user knows to hit "q".

> I think it also is unclear what to do with
>
>
>
>       OUTPUT: an integer or symbolic expression
>
>       EXAMPLES:
> :
>
> for someone who hasn't used command line much; hopefully trial-and-
> error yields that Return and space are useful, but...

Yep.  My solution of adding something to the docstring doesn't help
for this problem.  Usually people do figure it out though.

>
> Anyone know if these would be easy changes, or would they break a lot
> of IPython?
>
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-- 
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

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