Re: locate-with-filter

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   I think we can effectively eliminate help-follow.  It is not used for
   following any of the links that are explicitly presented in the doc
   string.

   So I propose this change:

This looks good, except that there are three problems:

1.  The most obvious problem is that your patch fails to erase part of
    the old help-follow.  Hence, after applying your patch,
    help-mode.el does not compile.  This is, of course, trivial to fix.

2.  After your changes, the CLICK arg to help-follow-mouse and the POS
    arg to help-follow are unused and hence should be deleted.  Then
    CLICK should no longer be capitalized in the docstring of
    `help-follow-mouse' and the doc of `help-follow' should no longer
    mention POS.  I suggest:

;; The doc string is meant to explain what buttons do.
(defun help-follow-mouse ()
  "Follow the cross-reference that you click on."
  (interactive)
  (error "No cross-reference here"))

;; The doc string is meant to explain what buttons do.
(defun help-follow ()
  "Follow cross-reference at point.

For the cross-reference format, see `help-make-xrefs'."
  (interactive)
  (error "No cross-reference here"))

3. help-follow is not only bound to RET and mouse-2, but also to `C-c C-c'.
   The `C-c C-c' binding is _not_ shadowed by xrefs.  Hence, `C-c C-c'
   gives the error message "No cross-reference here", everywhere,
   including on xrefs.  Hence, either the `C-c C-c' binding should be
   deletted, or, alternatively, the _old_ help-follow could be renamed
   to `help-follow-word' and `C-c C-c' could be bound to
   `help-follow-word' in help buffers.  If we do the latter, people
   who like the feature can still use it and they can even rebind it
   to RET if they prefer the old behavior.

Sincerely,

Luc.