GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 306131
Improve visibility of man/info pages in yelp
Last modified: 2009-09-22 01:54:34 UTC
Hello, I think Nautilus should be the starting point of Help search For example help:/// should open a page with a link on devhelp and yelp (even if I think this 2 components should be include inside nautilus nautilus should also be able to open man pages and info pages like konqueror try man:man in konqueror try also info:info help:/// in Nautilus could also provide a link to /usr/share/doc moreover help:/// could be linked to Beagle for searching local help (and/or linked on Google for web help) because we have to think about people who don't have permanent web connection... and we should provide an easy way to find local documentation. Regards
There is already a "Help" menu entry in the topmost toolbar of - I think - all applications. why would somebody try to enter "help:///" into nautilus? what do you mean by "help search" ? I believe most people that want to read man or info pages do that in a terminal anyway.
Try Konqueror with man:man info:info you will see that it is much more readable that in a terminal (that's one of the kde-apps that I found very usefull !) About search I think Nautilus could be the starting point of any search about documentation. It's sometimes very difficult to find information in the very long documentation in a GNU/Linux system... So Beagle could be a solution for local search. I have no idea of web search. Maybe it could search in the Gnome web site (a sort of knowledge database)
see also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217212
what's wrong with using yelp to read manpages?
The problem with yelp is that it is not very easy to find a specific man page. When I open yelp I see this Contenu de l'aide Catégories Bureau Applications Développement Système I don't see something like "man pages" or like "info page" Moreover there is no link to devhelp There is also so way to find help in man / info / /usr/share/doc In fact I don't understand why devhelp and why yelp Why not an extension to nautilus ? A least, a good thing could be to mix yelp and devhelp Provide man / info page reading abilities Provide a good help search engine. Regards Sébastien Celles
what version of yelp/distribution do you use? 2.10 has an option for manpages
Yelp 2.6.5 on Debian Sarge maybe the new version of Yelp can help us browsing manpages and info pages but I don't know if it have a search feature... Moreover it is not a starting poing to search in /usr/share/doc and I don't know if Yelp and Devhelp could be mixed together... I really think that if a USER is looking for help it could use Yelp... when browsing help, he could found some information about developpement (in the same application) ; so he could, if he like it, become a DEVELOPPER... ;-) I have a Gentoo distro for discovering new software... so I will have a look at Yelp 2.10...
Do you think the Yelp man and info pages are "visible" enough, i.e. do you think it is hard to navigate to the man/info sections?
With Yelp 2.9.3 on Ubuntu it's quite hard to found a specific man page Maybe a sort of input box where the user could enter a command could be a good idea. About info page : I don't see them I don't see any way to search a specific help. Like the 'apropos' command but apropos is not enough because apropos is only looking for man pages (neither info pages, neither /usr/share/doc) An other thing to do is to have a more colorized output of man page ;-) (konqueror has) see for example man:man
reopening
All right, there are like a dozen things being discussed in this thread, which makes this a difficult bug to track and manage. Aside from making Nautilus some sort of universal help viewer (which, I assure you, will never happen), what is the proposal in this bug report?
Maybe the title in not very good... I don't really understand why you said "making Nautilus some sort of universal help viewer (which, I assure you, will never happen)" I really think that mixing Nautilus, Yelp (and DevHelp) and Beagle could give to users a very usefull user interface
I think the key problem is as in comment #5: Yelp's 'Manual Pages' page shows this list of categories: * Applications * Configuration Files * Development * Games * Hardware Devices * Overviews * System Administration But it's hard to guess which category something falls under. Each page is a long list, so it's time-consuming to go through looking several of them. I suggest this simple fix: add a category 'All manual pages' at the top of the list.
Thanks... 'All manual pages' is a very good suggestion
I would agree with Joachim Noreiko, It would seem that the problem discussed here is accessibility to the documentation in Yelp. I think it was decided long ago on that Nautilus is a file browser, not a help or web browser etc.
Created attachment 56925 [details] [review] All man pages category A possible patch to add an "All man pages" section to the categories in the index. It shows up at the top of the categories (as they're organised alphabetically).
this essentially doubles the size of the TOC. As the number of man pages increases, this will cause the toc xslt processing to get slower, not sure if this is significant though. Perhaps a better solution is a text entry field to search for specific man pages.
In CVS, the search bar on the toolbar accepts input in the form of: man <foo> man:<foo> and will go directly to that man page. Patch is rejected anyway.
I'm marking this WONTFIX. If there are specific requests, file separate bugs.