Re: [RP] help showing unbound commands?

[Doug Kearns]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2002 at 04:03:05PM +0100, Martin Samuelsson wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 19, 2002 at 09:47:36PM +0000, Doug Kearns wrote:
> > > i think it would be a good thing to see unbound commands in the help as 
> > > well
> > > as those bound to keys.
> >  
> > I'm not sure about this. What is your motivation?
> 
> i think it would be for the greater good. it wouldn't be to much use for
> anyone on this list obviously, since we are experts on ratpoison and know
> more or less exactly what every command does. for a novice user though,
> getting a list of commands available would problary be helpful.
 
I'm not sure how useful the 'help' window is to novices anyway. Perhaps
'help' should just list all the commands with a short description. Then
'bind' without an argument could generate the current help screen with
the unbound commands added as well. However, this would break the 'just
like screen' model :-)

Is man ratpoison so difficult?

<snip>
 
> making computers easy to use is a design goal of ratpoison isn't it? and 
> making ratpoison itself useable should be the main topic of this mailing 
> list i guess?
 
Sure, I was just curious as to what you wanted this to achieve. It seems
as though you think it useful as a reminder of available colon commands?

I know the mutt help screen, for example, includes unbound commands. I
just haven't really found this useful.

<snip>
 
> > I just use a single rcfile so 'grep alias .ratpoisonrc' is usually
> > sufficient.
> 
> i can easyly(spl?) think up sitations where this is not sufficent. let's say
> that you have a script generating some aliases for example.

Of course, I was just wondering if _you_ actually did something like
this and therefore, needed the functionality.

Another problem is that the help window is very simple. My help window
ran out of space a long time ago.

So, I've just patched the help command to dump the bindings to stdout
when called non-interactively and wrote a small script to format this
list and pipe it through less. It uses the same colors and font so it
looks the same and it is now actually quite helpful :-)

Regards,
Doug