REPL help mode discoverability

devel-chm
Fri, 11 Dec 2020 18:20:15 +0000
General Usage

As a relative newcomer to Julia, I have been making increasing use of the REPL and other versions of tooling to understand and select a workflow for julia use. One problem I have is the ability to discover needed functions/methods/packages while working:

1. Package documentation is largely available online with limited ability to connect from the julia REPL (at least on my win10 julia-1.5.3)

2. Searching for a word with the “?word” help mode in the REPL doesn’t find “word” if the package/module defining it has not been loaded

3. Even if “using package” has been done, “word” doesn’t seem to be found unless exported

4. When method documentation is presented, there is no explicit module/package listed

Some ideas for possible improvements:

1. Local searchable package documentation (see this thread)

2. Ditto

3. This seems to be possible given that we have loaded the package, it would entail a more aggressive search for docs to methods exported and then to non-exported. Perhaps ordering by exported followed by non-exported in the display.

4. It would be a huge help if the one-line method/type/object description also included the module/package from which the documentation came. With all the multi-methods in Julia, knowing which module the method is documenting could greatly improve the utility of the REPL documentation.

Another Julia REPL wish:

Would it be possible to enable click-to-follow URL links in the terminal/console window of the REPL (including various modes)? That would be a great help with 1 and 2 above especially if 4 were implemented so one could directly connect to the relevant package documentation?

Apologies if this reads like a list of work for “other people” to do. I’m still coming up the learning curve for contribution to julia directly but from previous open source experience getting this type of feedback from new users can lead to a significantly improved julia experience. Once I get to the stage of being able to readily help with this type of thing, I’ll have trouble remembering what or that there was a problem at all.

I call this the problem of figuring out things that are “well known to those who know it well” which means it can be very difficult to even search because it is “obvious” to those who know so one can often not even find a discussion of the problem so that you can figure out what to call the problem to search for how to solve it. (Add tail recursion to this as needed…)

12 posts - 6 participants