[TxMt] Re: C Library bundle MONSTER

[David Clark]

William et al,

I am a casual observer,  and would not know how to build a bundle to
save my life, so my opinion could be meaningless.

I don't  think it is a redherring to delve into what kind of reference
is helpful. If I were a C developer I could definitely see  the value
of a bundle such as you have done. However, for whatever reason, TM
does not have the ability to do what you envision in an elegant way.

Having a bundle that is 2+ mb ddoes not mean that it is not a useful
bundle. Rather, because it is  really "pushing the envelope" of tm's
capabilities, it should be seen as prototype/alpha. I think the
operating assumption is that the macromates svn is for more "mature"
(in a technical sense), bundles.

Just my $.02

On 12/7/06, William D. Neumann <wneumann at cs.unm.edu> wrote:
> 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
>
> Life is unfair.  Kill yourself or get over it.
>         -- Black Box Recorder
>
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David Clark
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Institute for Community Inclusion (http://www.communityinclusion.org/)
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