is there an easy to read manual?

[zzzgit]

this tool is very hard to learn and configure. Is there a get started tutorial?

[eklhad]

this tool is very hard to learn and configure.

Agree.

Is there a get started tutorial?

Not explicitly. First time you bring it up it creates a .ebrc config file in your home directory that you can look at. It is just samples and mostly comments. Almost the same file is in doc/sample.ebrc in the github tree. This may help you set some things up.

There is of course a manual, but not sure it is "easy to read". You may want to start with, and return to again and again, the quick reference guide, all the commands in one place, grouped together by functionality.

http://www.edbrowse.org/usersguide.html#guide

Karl Dahlke

[jbaber]

Any reason not to have the command help (which doesn't exist now) provide the current URLs for the manual, quick reference, and wikis?

[eklhad]

Any reason not to have the command help (which doesn't exist now) provide the current URLs for the manual, quick reference, and wikis?

It's reasonable; but each version of edbrowse should then spit out the url of that version of the manual, thus we maintain versions of the manual on edbrowse.org, which we can do, or, someone who knows github better than I do can come up with the format of a url that extracts usersguide.html for the given version. That would be better I suppose. We're already tied to github as per the wiki reference.

Karl Dahlke

[jbaber]

Github does provide URLs for git sha1s and tags, e.g. https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CMB/edbrowse/v3.7.1/doc/usersguide.html and https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CMB/edbrowse/0d527923568efba614986937cdf52dd1a129e388/doc/usersguide.html

You can remove the prepended htmlpreview.github.io/? part if you just want the raw file for edbrowse to chew on.

[eklhad]

Thinking more about the help command, I might not want to print urls, or go to those urls, as we discussed before; it would be nice if edbrowse could give you some information locally, that is, even if you're not connected to the internet. That's what people expect from a help command.

I think the quick reference guide, lifted from the manual, is the most useful. I could write a perl script that copies that section into the edbrowse source at build time, and then

help

prints it to stdout, or pipes it to more (like the man pages), or puts the information in a new buffer and moves you to that buffer so you can read it any way you wish.

I kinda lean towards the latter, since it gives the user the most power.

Karl Dahlke

[jbaber]

I definitely agree what would satisfy the user most (and be least surprising) would be for a help command to open a new buffer containing a local copy of the manual.

[martinetd]

It was done in commit 0bfc733fd665917bf4c73576b4121217aebc5d18 - "help" wlil open a new buffer with the help.

[eklhad]

open a new buffer containing a local copy of the manual.

Well it's not the whole manual, but the reference guide with all the edbrowse commands. The whole manual is pretty confusing and intimidating. The command list seems to be what people want to reference, there are a lot of them, cryptic, and easily forgotten.

I asked Erwin if it was worth showing the French version if LANG=fr, since we have it, but he didn't think it was that vital. It would be consistent though, all the edbrowse messages in French etc. Well maybe some day if I have nothing better to do.

Karl Dahlke