GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 591782
Immediately show help pages of symbols, as my cursor goes over them
Last modified: 2020-11-07 12:12:46 UTC
In VS.NET I remember having a plugin or a feature (can't remember) that when my cursor was on a known symbol or a (in standard .NET) documented own method, immediately showed the help page for it in a pane. Anjuta's devhelp page requires me to copypaste that function into some textbox. Why? Just make it fast (and multithreaded, if that's the problem) and already perform the 'open help page for that symbol'. Please do consume my computer's resources and please ignore the people who claim that IDEs must run on hardwares that compare to phones' hardwares.
ps. The devhelp support should also index automatically and allow me to search documentation of own methods that got documented using gtk-doc style. Those are actually the most important ones to be honest.
And and just like in VS.NET could the tooltips show that documentation underneath a little [Show more] button placed onto the tooltip window. I remember having filed a bug about tooltips making the entire editor slow when enabled on scintilla. That's of course not a good implication: let a thread get that documentation, pre-index and pre-prepare it, etc etc. Put the damn computer to work, if necessary constantly, so that it's fast while coding.
Actually, we sort of work on the documentation stuff but it requires some changes to devhelp and some more powerful tooltip API in scintilla. Anyway, no need to copy&paste, you can simply press Shift-F1 to open the API help for the current symbol under the cursor. For the API help for you own documented symbols - well, that's kind of tricky and nothing that devhelp does. gobject-introspection probably can help there though.
nod. I was thinking GObject-introspection for this too. Problem with GI is that a source buffer might not be compilable but might already contain method documentation.
bugzilla.gnome.org is being replaced by gitlab.gnome.org. We are closing all old feature requests in Bugzilla which have not seen updates for many years. If you are still requesting this feature in a currently supported version of GNOME (currently that would be 3.38), then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/anjuta/-/issues/ Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry it could not be implemented.