[ESS] drop empty help buffers

Vitalie Spinu spinuvit at gmail.com
Wed Feb 29 11:22:02 CET 2012


>>>> Rodney Sparapani <rsparapa at mcw.edu>
>>>> on Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:12:01 -0600 wrote:

  > Martin Maechler wrote:
  >> that was fast.
  >> 
  >> IIRC the  previous  default was quite on purpose:
  >> 
  >> It's not only for a non-existing command that you get a bogous help buffer,
  >> and in some of other such cases, the user should be able to see and
  >> read what the bogous buffer contains.

>From `ess-help-bogus-buffer-p' I see that except of the "no
documentation" bogus buffer there might be "Error in help" bogus buffer,
which frankly, I've never seen before. In all other cases, help buffer
is popped up. So I believe we are quite safe here.

  >> (and also note that error messages by in other languages than English,
  >> so you can't just grep for the
  >> kind of error message,...)

Good point, I think, there are actually a couple of other places where
English statements are tracked. The only solution for this one is to
internalize into ESS the help calls. I am also quite annoyed by tk
dialogs asking for the package if there are several occurrences of the
help topic. Much better if emacs would pop up a minibufer request. So at
least two reasons to write our own help handling routines.

  >> 
  > Well, the buffer contains...
  > No documentation for 'foo' in specified packages and libraries:
  > you could try '??foo'

  > And ??foo gives...
  > No documentation for '?foo' in specified packages and libraries:
  > you could try '???foo'

  > What can you learn from that?  With t as the default; it just says
  > "No documentation" in the mini-buffer.  What am I missing?



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