Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> After looking into the helpful code I realize it used s.el, dash.el and some
>> other libraries which are not part of Emacs, so I guess chances to get it into
>> Emacs are slim to none, since all those packages would also need inclusion.
>
> From helpful.el:
>
> ;; Package-Requires: ((emacs "25") (dash "2.18.0") (s "1.11.0") (f
> "0.20.0") (elisp-refs "1.2"))
>
> IIUC, "dash", "s" and "f" are just convenience libraries that could be
> replaced with built-in functions.  We have already added some things
> to Emacs in recent years that have been inspired by those libraries,
> and if there is something needed that is still missing, we could
> consider adding that too.
>
> I don't know what "elisp-refs" is or does, but it has the same
> principal author as helpful.el.
>
> So it seems to me that none of this is impossible to resolve, in one
> way or another.
No, of course it is not impossible; I was aware of that when I wrote it, but
still, it means we have to re-work it. But someone else didn't want to have two
different code bases etc. 

What I have learned form this list, is, if I want something to have, I have to
build-it and submit patch, and not even then I am guaranteed to have it in
Emacs :-).

I also haen't seen any responses from Wifred, so I'll just see if I can
implement those things I care most for: lookup docs for autoladed functions
without docs in the stub, and not yet loaded, and code inlined in help buffer,
instead of just plain link. The former would make it possible to save some
space, for example docs does not need to be included in stubs, and can be
fetched on demand, and the latter is just plain nice to have. It saves time if I
can just scroll other (help) buffer and read the source without need ot click on
link in it to fetch the source code.