Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Eduardo Ochs]

On Thu, 9 Sept 2021 at 12:22, Daniel Martín <mardani29@yahoo.es> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> 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
> 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.
>
> If we can get copyright papers, perhaps we could start by integrating
> the functionality of elisp-refs as an xref backend.  Then the help
> system could use the new backend to provide a "References" link button.


Another vote for "extracting features"/"refactoring helpful" here...

I tried to add support for helpful to eev about a year ago and I got
lost and stuck - I only had a few hours to play with it, and I was not
super focused, but was quite frustrated at the end. I was hoping that
helpful would be structured as a library plus a front-end, and it was
not. I'll try again this weekend. =/

  Cheers,
    Eduardo Ochs
    http://angg.twu.net/#eev