Saturday, March 07, 2015

GT-Tools and HelpTopics

"Back in the good old Pharo days" (TM) I once wrote a simple help tool so we could provide a better infrastructure to browse documentation inside of the image. The idea was as simple and minimalistic as the domain model: basically anything one requires is a HelpTopic class with a title and contents. Any help topic can have subtopics so in the end they form a substructure of books with chapters. Additionally I implemented a simple HelpBrowser tool that can browse the help tree. Later some additional tools where added like editing the help contents or creating topics from wiki style syntax. If I'm not mistaken the simple help tool is also used in Squeak.

This week I played with the new GTTools in Pharo 4 (GTInspector, Spotter) and added some specific inspectors for the help topics. After e-mail conversation with Andrei Chis and Tudor Girba this was extended even more. The result is described in this nice blogpost.

It shows how powerful the adoptable GT tools in Pharo 4beta already are.

More to come like including the search of help title/contents in the spotter tool.

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