[Python-ideas] Cleaner separation of help() and interactive help.

[Ben Finney]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> writes:

> Greg Ewing wrote:

(Greg's message isn't showing up on my Usenet server.)

> > Come to think of it, the whole concept of a pager is something of an
> > anti-feature nowadays, when most people's "terminal" is really a gui
> > window with its own scrolling facilities that are considerably
> > better than the pager's.

Not at all. Most of my GUI terminal windows are running a terminal
multiplexer, which is constantly controlling the whole terminal output
as a full-terminal application. That totally defeats the GUI scrolling
capability, and means that any scrolling I want to occur needs to be
done via the terminal features.

Terminal multiplexers include BSD's ‘tmux’ and GNU Screen.

> This is open source, and people scratch their own itch. I daresay
> help() was written to suit the working processes of the creator. That
> suits me fine, because I like help() just the way it is, I like the
> pager just the way it is, and I don't want it to change. So -1 on any
> change to the default behaviour.

Indeed. Even if it werent the case that the GUI scrolling capability
were useless in this case, I would still want to use PgUp and PgDn keys
to do it – which are (correctly) captured by the terminal program, and
not available for GUI scrolling.

> > What I'd really like is for interactive help output to appear in a
> > new window, preferably using by favourite text editor so I can use
> > its searching facilities, which are also considerably better than
> > the pager's.

You might want that, and I can see that it's a valid request.

It's not at all what I want, though. Switching context to another window
costs me valuable attention and “flow”. Having the help appear in
exactly the same window is priceless for maintaining my attention on the
task.

> Personally, I hate it when applications decide to launch additional
> applications without an explicit request.

Yup.

-- 
 \         “It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival |
  `\                                   value.” —Arthur C. Clarke, 2000 |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney