[haiku-development] Re: Yet another Task for GSoC: HUD

Am 01.03.2012 09:24, schrieb x-otic@xxxxxxx:

This feature provably makes absolutely no sense at all, if it were
just based on menu item names with some scripting to extract them from
the running application.

  >

...snip...

It would be sort of a combination of finding menu
items (or lets call them commands) combined with a standard way to
declare these commands programmatically with short documentation.



This is something a GSoC student could try to find an elegant solution for.


Am I right in assuming that this is going to never leave the drawing board?
Or should it be formulated another way. Are there issues? Some clear statements 
would be very appreciated...
In a perfect world, there would be a unified help system build into every application. And it would tie in with application scripting. Every Haiku application would internally declare each command that is available via menu or scripting. It would declare a short description of the feature in the current language, and also multiple alternative keywords.
If every application worked this way, both the proposed "menu command search" feature as well as built-in quick-help and even reliable scripting would work across all applications. That would be just great.
I am not saying that the "menu command search" can only be implemented after rewriting most apps. But I am arguing that the feature is only usefull once most apps are rewritten with it in mind. And it doesn't make sense to implement the UI without at least adding the API for applications to declare their supported commands this way. Otherwise it's pretty useless as it doesn't even provide a motivation to update any apps. 

Best regards,
-Stephan

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