Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Kevin Montuori <montuori@gmail.com> writes:

> I always took self documenting to mean that what documentation
> there is (and there's a lot of it!) is installed with the
> application.  There seems to be a trend of documentation wikis
> or online-only docs

Actually, it is the Emacs documentation that is "on-line" (as
opposed to printed on paper) :) (You might remember the company
Sierra On-Line who did the horribly bad Kings Quest games.)

I agree whatever documentation there is should always be included
with the software itself. You should never need Internet access to
get the manual. If you have Internet access, you should be able to
find errata, or (optimally) be able to update your static manual
on your HDD.

I remember some applications of the distant past - when you stroke
the "help" command, what you saw was

Connecting to the help server...

and you never got what you needed.

As for wikis, I think the idea is great, but it has to be a
complement (as you say) because it only works on the Internet,
which you cannot access (again, as you say) with your own
razor-sharp tools, *and*, it must be dedicated to something *big*,
so that many people use it. The "real" wiki, Wikipedia, is great,
as so many people use it (although some of the articles are a bit
boring to read, IMHO), and an Emacs wiki is a great idea, because
it is a big subject, with lots of details, and an active and
creative (to say the least) user base - but, for each company or
piece of software to has its own wiki - with 20 articles, all
stubs - that's ridiculous.

I wrote something cool recently to make Wikipedia searches from
Emacs. It is actually only the last couple of lines that do it -
the rest is just fancy stuff - it will default to the region, if
there is one, or the word at point, and it will show it if it
isn't too long, etc. Anyhow:

(defun wiki-search (str)
  "Search Wikipedia for STR. Show the \"printable\" version."
  (interactive
   (let*((default-search (if (region-active-p) (region-to-string)
                           (thing-at-point 'word) ))
         (max-len 20)
         (peek (if (> (length default-search) max-len)
                   (format "%s..."
                           (substring default-search 0 max-len) )
                 default-search) ))
     (list (read-string
            (format " Search string (%s): " peek)
            nil nil default-search ))))
  (w3m-new-tab)
  (w3m
   (format "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%s\&printable=yes" str) )
  )

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573