[Newbies] Question / Thought about absence of any standard online help

itsme213 itsme213 at hotmail.com
Thu Nov 1 19:05:39 UTC 2007


Is there some reason why the myriad tools in Squeak don't have even a 
placeholder button or menu item for online help? From my newbies point of 
view it is very frustrating to try to do something (refactor to extract a 
method with a parameter, most recently) and be confronted with a totally new 
editor (Selector editor, in this case) and not have any idea about what the 
panels and buttons mean (Up? Down? Ok?). I finally figured it out, but it 
took 15 minutes of blind trial and error. It is very disheartening and a 
huge hurdle for someone who wants to get started with Squeak.

Shouldn't online help be a standard part of any IDE framework, making it 
easy for tool writers to add a few lines of online help in a standard way? 
Perhaps include some url links? Heck, if the tool even had a standard link 
(e.g. on SystemWindow) to a standard place on a Squeak wikis, anyone (even 
me) could contribute to the help.

And yes, I know that getting those lines written is a separate matter.






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