Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Arthur Miller]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
>> Cc: stefan@marxist.se,  me@wilfred.me.uk,  emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>>   mardani29@yahoo.es
>> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2021 10:00:47 +0200
>> 
>> What I care most for at the moment are: doc lookup for autoladed functions
>> without the doc in the stub, and not yet loaded; and code inlined in help 
>> buffer,
>> instead of just plain link. The former would make it possible to save some
>> space, for example docs does not need to be included in stubs, and can be
>> fetched on demand. For example package-quickstart.el wouldn't need to pack 
>> 800
>> kb of docs when some of those will never be requested anyway.
>
> If this means asking for help on an autoloaded function will load its
> package, I don't think it should be the default.  We could perhaps
No no, not loading the package. Just docs. That can be arranged, right? Since we
are poking in sources anyway? :). Of course it would not be by default. We know
that all new options are comming with a defcustom to turn them on, since thay
are off by default :).

No, it is (relatively) cpu intensive, especially if user run with compressed
sources. User could have also opted out sources, so it can't be a default
option at all.

I remember a discussion with someone on Reddit who complained that helpful is
slow for him, and I forgott in that discussion that I am running directly from
the source dir with uncompressed sources.

> arrange for a button that would load the package and display the full
> documentation, but that's all.
>
>> The latter is just plain nice to have. It saves time if I can just scroll 
>> other
>> (help) buffer and read the source without need ot click on link in it to 
>> fetch
>> the source code.
>
> Again, displaying the source by default is too much, IMNSHO: the code
> of a function could be very large.  Doing this by default also assumes
> that the user will necessarily want to look at the source, something
> that is IME questionable at best.  So this should also be optional,
> and even then the code should be changed to avoid showing a huge
> *Help* window (since currently, we fit the window size to the text in
> the *Help* buffer).

Exactly, and same here, not by default but as an opt-in option.