Re: new help browser

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Wed, 31 May 2000, Telsa Gwynne wrote:

> > What do you all think about that feature?  Comments, suggestions,
> > criticism?
> 
> What I'd like to see instead is something which relies very much on
> what I saw of Nautilus being demonstrated at GUADEC. Like most file
> managers, it looks like this:
> 
> (Beware! ASCII art!)
> 
>         |----------------------------| (titlebar,
>         |----------------------------| okay? :))
>         |        |      lots of      |
>         |  tree  |      icons/text   |
>         |  view  |      here         |      
>         |        |                   |
>         ------------------------------
> 
> And that pane I've labelled on the left doesn't -have- to be a tree
> view. In fact, they said they thought that tree views would not 
> necessarily make sense for all users. And that you should be able to
> flip between alternatives in the left-hand pane. There are two things 
> I think would be excellent uses for the left-hand pane in the help browser.
> First, a glossary, which I think is what you're meaning by index.
> Second, what I would call an index, which would be slightly different.

The "help browser v2" that Jonathan and I had started on was working
almost exactly like this - it consisted basically of a couple of metaviews
(help contents tree, help search (not finished), and help index) that
would be used in conjunction with the normal HTML display view of
nautilus.

If someone has time to finish coding this work of art (primarily, doing
the search engine and polishing the interface) it would be mega-cool.

-- Elliot
"Moron of the week" for four years running