[TxMt] Re: C Library bundle MONSTER

[William D. Neumann]

On Thu, 7 Dec 2006, Mark Eli Kalderon wrote:

> It is good to get documentation within your editor. There were two issues I 
> think. One is the conflation of autocompletion and accessing documentation. 
> Since Thomas Aylott is addressing autocompletion, let me make a remark about 
> documentation. I don't think that it is useful to have documentation inserted 
> into the document that you are working on. Far better to have a command that 
> will open the documentation in a separate window. It is easy to pipe man 
> pages into an html window (and you can take advantage of the built in CSS to 
> boot). So I must agree that it would be better if the documentation for the C 
> library followed the model provided by control-H in other bundles.

That's not what I'm talking about when I say documentation.
Say you need to use function F, and you know that it takes parameters X Y 
and Z, but you can't remember which order they're in.  And also, you think 
there might be a W in there as well, but that could just be in function G.

Now what's easier, F*tab* (up pops "F (Z, X, Y)" and you've gotten all you 
need to know) or some command that opens up a new window with a man page 
in it that hopefully has the information you want clearly visible, where 
you then have to get the info from the aux window into your code and or 
hide the aux window so you can get back to coding?  Is this bundle the 
best way to do things?  Not really, but it's certainly better than the 
half-assed method of piping a man page to a new window.

And of course what if you're using some language where the documentation 
isn't available as easily?  Perhaps it's in a PDF file -- sure, you could 
open it in Preview or some other similar app and leaf through it or search 
in it for what you want, but that still pulls you out of the editing 
environment.

William D. Neumann

---

"There's just so many extra children, we could just feed the
children to these tigers.  We don't need them, we're not doing 
anything with them.

Tigers are noble and sleek; children are loud and messy."

         -- Neko Case

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