While I absolutely adore FreePascal I miss one feature from my old borland days, but that would require a little work.

I miss being able to put the cursor on a function/procedure/reserved word name and hitting F1 to see the help section for it. It was wonderful for looking up the structure of a function you had not used in a while.
In fact, very often when stuck on how to do something, I would type in a likely-sounding name and upon hitting F1 get the info I needed (the beauty of Pascal is that pretty much everything has a likely sounding name).

We already have documentation for every standard pascal function, and for most of the FPC specific additions (like fpc-crt or the linux unit functions) what I think we need to do is decide on a standard format (prefferably one you can convert to) with a reader that will grep the function descriptions based on a parameter, and show the section(s) which match.

For example:
fphelp writeln
Should show you all you need to know about writeln. It will then take a fairly small patch to the FP-IDE to make it pass whatever word is under the cursor to the program.

Ideally fphelp would simply print the results to standard out, that way a simple assignstream in the ide could capture the result and display it in a window, and people like me could use it with equal success in any other editor/ide that can be configured enough. Nedit and VIM(which I use) will both be able work just fine.

This way we match the feature, and expand on it by not limiting it to those who *still* like the old (and very limited) dos style editing commands. Since there is nothing really complex about such a tool, if the underlying document format does not require platform specific libraries to read, it will also port beautifully to any of the FPC supported operating systems and architectures.

What do everybody else think of such an approach to it ?

I would love to write it as a contribution, but frankly the code here is not the issue, it is the choice of the underlying format. It must be searchable, fast, easy to convert to and not limited to any specific platform. Something like xml perhaps ? I wait to hear from all.

A.J. Venter wrote

I miss being able to put the cursor on a function/procedure/reserved word name and hitting F1 to see the help section for it.

The text mode IDE already has support for this (using the html documentation).

Jonas

I use to use borland's turbo pascal ide once too, but I don't miss this feature :) Nowadays vim suits be better

cheers
James

Trouble is, that is the only feature I miss !
Everything else about the borland IDE is downright annoying in it's primitiveness. Had this not been the case, I would have been using the fp ide anyway.
I use vim myself.
Hence my thought of a separate proggie that can do this. The easy way here would be to extract the section of the fp ide that does this, and create a modified standalone version that simply dumps the results to standard out. No sense reinventing the wheel, except for one tiny downside - we have no access to the ide sources.
Perhaps someone who does could mail me just the part in question, I will do the rest.
I cannot imagine I am the only one who would like this.

Mind you, it would even make a nifty plugin for lazarus.

A.J.

A.J. Venter wrote

No sense reinventing the wheel, except for one tiny downside - we have no access to the ide sources.

Sure you do, checkout the module "ide" from cvs. The problem with the IDE is that you can't build the version we distribute, because of the problems with the Free Vision license.

Jonas