[763] in Athena User Interface
Re: Removal of extra entries; Athena help
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Fri May 11 17:08:43 2001
Message-Id: <200105112108.RAA19136@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 17:08:39 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
> > However, starting up gnome-help-browser (which is on the menus)
> > still gives you a page
> > (/usr/athena/share/gnome/help/help-browser/C/default.html) which
> > features prominently a broken link to the Gnome User's Guide.
>
> Probably best to just take gnome-help-browser out of the menus. I
> assume we already have a separate menu option for getting to Athena
> help (using netscape, not the gnome help browser).
What gnome-help-browser does give you is a user-friendly interface to
man and info pages. In the long run, Nautilus provides the same
functionality, but can also be a more fully functional web browser.
Certainly manpages are easy enough to access from the command line.
But the browser here does provide a rather nice listing of all the
manpages available on the local system, which is nice if you want to
go exploring. Manpages in lockers unfortunately aren't accessible
from here, so that's a bit confusing. Personally, I find the Emacs
info system almost completely unnavigable, and much prefer the newer
hypertext interface.
Here's a thought: let the entry point for Athena Help be the menu
entry that launches OLH in Netscape, and use gnome-help-browser as a
display engine for "Local man and info pages" or somesuch. Or maybe
Greg's suggestion to drop gnome-help-browser entirely is for the best,
if most users wouldn't really gain anything from a better GUI for man
and info pages.
Oh ya, and it turns out that the Gnome User's Guide is actually on the
web, too: http://www.labs.redhat.com/gug/users-guide/
I'm sure it's an excellent resource for Athena-Gnome documentors. 8)
-B.
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
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