Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Arthur Miller]

Daniel Martín <mardani29@yahoo.es> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> A week or two ago I was actually looking at Emacs help code. I wanted to 
>> bring
>> in the source code as well as references into help lookup, but honestly, I 
>> would
>> rather prefer to just include helpful instead of re-implementing everything. 
>> If
>> the authors have signed the paperwork, I see no reason why not just include
>> it. Also original help lookup could be left as low-resource, faster solution 
>> for
>> people who prefer to spend less resources on help lookup, while helpful 
>> could be
>> enabled by a custom variable, something like show extended help or as
>> a minor mode.
>
> Instead of integrating the library as a whole, I'd prefer we extract
> those features from Helpful that people think are useful and not already
> available in Emacs.  I don't think that having two separate help systems
> in core is a good idea, there'll be too much duplication and maintenance
> burden.
I don't think there is much of duplication there. Those two libraries don't
share exactly same code, so extracting features is not as straightforward as one
might expect. At least it seem so to me. In principle, extracting stuff from
helpful, would be as easy as to re-implement helpful for Emacs in that
case. Maybe I am wrong, I am not very familiar with code bases for neither of
those, I just glanced over it a couple of weeks ago. But in general, I think
there are more fun places to hack on, than to reimplement somethign that already
works. Just bring it in :).

Anyway for extracting something from helpful, there is still need
for original author(s) to do the fsf paperwork, and to be willing to donate
their code to Emacs.

> Showing references to a symbol is an interesting feature (for example,
> to learn how to use an ELisp API by looking at examples).  I see that

When things don't go the way I expect them, I use helpful to look up the
function and see the source code.

> Helpful provides this feature via the separate package elisp-refs
> (https://github.com/Wilfred/elisp-refs).  The closest package I know
> that actually understands ELisp is el-search from ELPA, but elisp-refs
> is a more specific package for the concrete use case of searching for
> references.
I have't looked how it does, but I guess you are correct.