Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)

[Simon Josefsson]

On 22 Apr 2002, Miles Bader wrote:

> Per Abrahamsen <address@hidden> writes:
> > > Hm.  Another approach would be if C-h v and friends groked :link.
> > > Maybe that is better.  Yes, probably.  Existing doc strings that
> > > contains duplicated links in docstring and :link would need to be
> > > fixed though.
> > 
> > Yes, it has been on my list of "small projects I really ought to do"
> > for some time now.
> 
> I think that's not the best solution for this problem, since there's
> already enough information to make such a connection automatically in
> the great majority of cases.

Are you saying that customize should adopt the "See info node" docstring 
magic instead?

Another reason for that approach instead of the :link one is that it makes
the docstring contain all the documentation, including pointers to other
places.  I think I have changed my mind. Making all code that displays or
parse docstrings somehow support :link as well isn't the best approach.  
It is easier to use the docstring, and have well defined tags such as "See
Info node" convert into buttons for customize.

> > A more controversial solution would be to 
> > 
> >   (defalias 'describe-variable 'customize-variable)
> 
> Yes; that would be very bad.
> 
> Customization buffers are filled with all sorts of crap that's
> completely unnecessary when you just want to see a quick description of
> a variable (which is about 99% of the time for me), which would distract
> greatly from the actual documentation (not to mention ballooning the
> size of help buffers to something absurd).

The customize screen could be cleaned up to solve this.  However, I find
customize-variable slow compared to describe-variable so I agree this
would be a bad solution.