Re: Nautilus as help browser - first impressions.

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Wed, 23 Aug 2000, Alexander Kirillov wrote:

> -------------
> 1. Help tree (in the left panel): 
>     This tree contains "Applications",
>     "Development", "info", "manual" and "system". To my surprise, most
>     of man pages are *not* in the section "manual". For example man
>     pages for user commands (Section 1) are in Applications->Command
>     line and man pages for section 5 (File formats) are in System
>     ->Configuration. I strongly object. I never thought that xeyes is
>     a command line application. On the other hand, tar is a command
>     line app - but info page for tar is not in Applications->Command
>     line. I'd rather have no attempt in categorization at all than
>     such half-baked one.

I disagree - I would rather have the man pages categorized loosely than
have them in

There are two problems though - if the label "command line" is there, that
is incorrect, maybe Ali did that. Also, I think I intended to have a map
to put specific man pages into specific tree locations - I'm pretty sure I
implemented something like that (or maybe that was for info pages).

> 4. Info pages: 
>    Info pages are rendered OK. However:
>    a. It can't find info pages if they do not have "info" in file
>      name. On my system, many info pages do not - e.g.,
>      /usr/info/emacs.gz. Thus, "info:emacs" does not work. 

Your system is broken, then. :)

>    b. There is no way to view the top level info file (dir.info)

If you mean /usr/info/dir, then no, you can't view it because it is not an
info file. I do not think it is useful, because it mostly duplicates what
is in the tree, and people care more about finding documentation than
finding a list of documentation in a specific format.

> 5. html docs 
> 
>    at the moment, help:appname can't find "index.html" (fixed by Ali
>    in CVS, I believe), but "help:/path/to/file" works, and html docs
>    are rendered well. 
> 6. sgml docs
> 
>    I only tried "help:/pat/to/file.sgml". It works fast (on my system
>    - PIII 500Mhz, 128 Mb RAM) even for large ones like "GDP
>    handbook". But here are problems (some of them already discussed in
>    gnome-doc-list, but anyway): 

> Wishlist: 
>   
>    1.  It'd be great if we could put the table of contents (TOC) of a doc in
>        the left panel so that you have a section shown in the right
>        panel and TOC in the left panel at the same time

The intent at one point was to have the TOC be part of the help tree under
each doc.

>    2. I'd love to see TOC "expanding" - i.e., showing only top level
>       sections by default, but clicking on a section expands it so you
>       can see subsections, etc. 
> 
>    3. I think we really need a "print" button - for those who want to
>       print out a section of a manual and read it. Nothing fancy. 

This would be a generic nautilus problem...

>    4. List of man pages or info pages is, by necessity, very long. Why
>       not group them by first letter (..pages starting with A;
>       ...pages starting with B, etc)? Otherwise, you have to scroll a
>       lot to get to XFree86 page

This will work if man pages and info pages are ever in a big long list,
but I do not think that should ever happen...

-- Elliot
The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8 meters per second per second.