Re: Patch to disable links line in *info* buffer

[Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@glug.org>]

"Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes:

   Whether it is more useful depends on your goal.

the goal is to act in an exemplery fashion, to demonstrate the path taken.

   But for my primary audience, this series of keystrokes fails; it is
   like a magic catenation that does the job, but you don't learn the
   physics.  My audience need to learn that there is a `dir' file.  They
   need to learn that you can go from the dir file to a specific Info
   file; and that in the Info file, you can go to a specific node.  And
   they need to be inspired to do this.

chunking issue: "(emacs)Top" is fine for top-level, but for deeper nodes, say
"(emacs)Mode Line", the path can be represented:

  C-h i
  m Emacs RET
  m Mode Line RET

so, to show this just requires some "info-follow-path-slowly" that does the
equivalent of

  (info "(emacs)Mode Line")

w/ a pause in between each step and a nice message saying "you can do this
yourself next time".  then, the "link data" is just ("Emacs" "Mode Line") and
you can tell people:

  (info-follow-path-slowly "Emacs" "Mode Line")

working sketch below.

(as for how to inspire people, just set the default `sit-for' values to beyond
normal patience threshold.  this is the stick part, using emacs is the carrot.
;-)

thi


___________________________________________________________
(defun info-follow-path-slowly (&rest path)
  (info)
  ;; TODO: get back to top-level somehow
  (message "this is the dir file")
  (sit-for 5)
  (while path
    (let ((name (car path)))
      (re-search-forward (concat "^* " name))
      (message "next, we're going to go to ``%s''" name)
      (sit-for 5)
      (Info-menu name)
      (message "ok, now we're at ``%s''" name)
      (sit-for 5))
    (setq path (cdr path)))
  (message "we're here -- everyone to the bathroom!"))