I have the following page bookmarked: http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/ I'd like to ask 2 things. 1. Would it be possible to make the *huge* list of package names at the top collapsable? (That way I don't have to scroll through several pages of uninteresting text to get to the bit I actually want.) 2. Could we make is so all items are collapsed initially? (Currently they're all expended initially - which makes it take rather a long time to find anything.) Just thought I'd ask...
I agree about the top part. It's not very interesting, especially not
in a document used as a reference. Perhaps we could move it to the end
and provide an anchor link from the different modules down to their
package explanation.
A tip is to use Firefox's search as you type feature if you know the
module name.
Cheers,
Johan
On 9/9/07, Andrew Coppin
I have the following page bookmarked:
http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/
I'd like to ask 2 things.
1. Would it be possible to make the *huge* list of package names at the top collapsable? (That way I don't have to scroll through several pages of uninteresting text to get to the bit I actually want.)
2. Could we make is so all items are collapsed initially? (Currently they're all expended initially - which makes it take rather a long time to find anything.)
Just thought I'd ask...
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On Sunday 09 September 2007 16:40, Andrew Coppin wrote:
I have the following page bookmarked:
http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/
I'd like to ask 2 things.
1. Would it be possible to make the *huge* list of package names at the top collapsable? (That way I don't have to scroll through several pages of uninteresting text to get to the bit I actually want.)
What do you mean exactly with "the *huge* list of package names"? The description list with the short textual descriptions of each package? I'd say that this list is highly interesting to people unfamiliar with the package structure, so it is good that it is there.
2. Could we make is so all items are collapsed initially? (Currently they're all expended initially - which makes it take rather a long time to find anything.)
Again this depends on the use case: I'd vote strongly against collapsing the list initially, because that way the incremental search in Firefox won't work without un-collapsing everything. When the index is generated with a more recent Haddock, you get a search field, which does an incremental search, so this might perhaps be more what you are looking for. A more aesthetical note: We should really get rid of the ugly table/CSS layout mixture, the lower part of the page renders a bit ugly and varies between browsers. Switching to pure CSS should be safe in 2007, I guess. Cheers, S.
Sven Panne wrote:
On Sunday 09 September 2007 16:40, Andrew Coppin wrote:
1. Would it be possible to make the *huge* list of package names at the top collapsable? (That way I don't have to scroll through several pages of uninteresting text to get to the bit I actually want.)
What do you mean exactly with "the *huge* list of package names"? The description list with the short textual descriptions of each package? I'd say that this list is highly interesting to people unfamiliar with the package structure, so it is good that it is there.
Well, if I could collapse it with a single click, it would be much easier to scroll past it and get to the thing I'm looking for. I didn't say remove it, just give me the option to hide it. ;-)
2. Could we make is so all items are collapsed initially? (Currently they're all expended initially - which makes it take rather a long time to find anything.)
Again this depends on the use case: I'd vote strongly against collapsing the list initially, because that way the incremental search in Firefox won't work without un-collapsing everything.
Oh goodie... So it's there to keep the machines happy? It's just tedious that every single time I load up this page, I have to spend 30 seconds manually collapsing everything so I can get to the module I actually want to look at. (The alternative is to manually scroll the 13-page list my hand. Not very funny...) OK, so... can we add a pair of "expand all"/"collapse all" buttons then?
On Sunday 09 September 2007 18:41, Andrew Coppin wrote:
[...] Well, if I could collapse it with a single click, it would be much easier to scroll past it and get to the thing I'm looking for. I didn't say remove it, just give me the option to hide it. ;-)
OK, that shouldn't be too hard to implement.
Oh goodie... So it's there to keep the machines happy?
No, it's there to keep *me* happy when I'm looking for a module. ;-)
It's just tedious that every single time I load up this page, I have to spend 30 seconds manually collapsing everything so I can get to the module I actually want to look at. (The alternative is to manually scroll the 13-page list my hand. Not very funny...)
I still fail to understand why you have to scroll or collapse manually, every browser I know of has a search facility. And there is the index page, where you have an incremental search facility even when your poor browser (guess which one I mean? :-) doesn't have it, at least when the index has been generated by a recent Haddock.
OK, so... can we add a pair of "expand all"/"collapse all" buttons then?
Again, this should be rather easy to add. Cheers, S.
Sven Panne wrote:
On Sunday 09 September 2007 18:41, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Oh goodie... So it's there to keep the machines happy?
No, it's there to keep *me* happy when I'm looking for a module. ;-)
Well, there's over 200 modules relating to graph theory alone. (Modules that I will never ever need, since I don't even know what graph theory *is*...) There's also a few hundred OpenGL modules - which I won't be looking at unless I specifically want to do something with OpenGL... In summary, it's probably quicker to be able to just expand the ones I want to look at, rather than collapse the ones I don't want to look at. (Works for Windows Explorer and the file system, eh?)
I still fail to understand why you have to scroll or collapse manually, every browser I know of has a search facility. And there is the index page, where you have an incremental search facility even when your poor browser (guess which one I mean? :-) doesn't have it, at least when the index has been generated by a recent Haddock.
I dislike searches. When all the categories are collapsed, they fit onto a single page. The hierachy is sufficiently shallow that from there you can instantly get to any module. And if you can't remember the exact name of the module, searches are useless but you can probably find it visually in a few clicks. OTOH, I recently discovered that GHCi has the ability to show you what's defined in a given module without me having to wait 40 seconds for Firefox to start... Shame you can't scroll its output. (And still no help if you're not sure of the module name.) If you're really stuck, there's always Hoogle. Assuming you can guess either the likely function name or the correct order and type of its arguments... (And on occasion it has a habit of not showing the function you're looking for, or just showing it very far down the list, even though the type signature *exactly* matches what you typed... but usually it's quite good.)
Andrew Coppin wrote:
OTOH, I recently discovered that GHCi has the ability to show you what's defined in a given module without me having to wait 40 seconds for Firefox to start... Shame you can't scroll its output. (And still no help if you're not sure of the module name.)
!!! Run ghci in an environment with a scroll buffer then? Like a non-braindead terminal application, or emacs? (The latter even gives you convenient reverse-incremental-search to search through the info you just printed) Jules
Jules Bean wrote:
Andrew Coppin wrote:
OTOH, I recently discovered that GHCi has the ability to show you what's defined in a given module without me having to wait 40 seconds for Firefox to start... Shame you can't scroll its output. (And still no help if you're not sure of the module name.)
!!!
Run ghci in an environment with a scroll buffer then? Like a non-braindead terminal application, or emacs? (The latter even gives you convenient reverse-incremental-search to search through the info you just printed)
I don't know if Andrew is a windows user, but if so he might not be aware that even with the (otherwise braindead) command window the number of lines buffered is a configurable property (on WinXP at least). I have it set to 1000 lines. The other thing I've found that makes the use of command line tools a lot less painful than it would otherwise be in windows is the "Open Command Window Here" Power Toy.. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx It's still nowhere near as good as the old XTree though :-( Regards -- Adrian Hey
On Sun, Sep 09, 2007 at 05:38:03PM +0200, Sven Panne wrote:
On Sunday 09 September 2007 16:40, Andrew Coppin wrote:
I have the following page bookmarked:
http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/
I'd like to ask 2 things.
1. Would it be possible to make the *huge* list of package names at the top collapsable? (That way I don't have to scroll through several pages of uninteresting text to get to the bit I actually want.)
What do you mean exactly with "the *huge* list of package names"? The description list with the short textual descriptions of each package?
It's about a fifth of the page, I think, and it'll get larger percentagewise as base breaks up more. Also, on Debian systems, we add all installed libraries to this index, so it gets even larger.
I'd say that this list is highly interesting to people unfamiliar with the package structure, so it is good that it is there.
Is that really helpful? There isn't a mapping from package name to modules, so I'm not sure what it buys you. I'm sure I've never looked at it. I'm interested in other opinions on this, as I planned to remove the list from the Debian packages. Would it be better to have a separate page with a package index, containing the description of each package and a link to each of the modules that it provides? Thanks Ian
Sven Panne wrote:
2. Could we make is so all items are collapsed initially? (Currently they're all expended initially - which makes it take rather a long time to find anything.)
Again this depends on the use case: I'd vote strongly against collapsing the list initially, because that way the incremental search in Firefox won't work without un-collapsing everything.
This is exactly why the list is expanded by default. At first I made it default to collapsed, and people complained (possibly Sven, in fact :-).
When the index is generated with a more recent Haddock, you get a search field, which does an incremental search, so this might perhaps be more what you are looking for.
A more aesthetical note: We should really get rid of the ugly table/CSS layout mixture, the lower part of the page renders a bit ugly and varies between browsers. Switching to pure CSS should be safe in 2007, I guess.
Please, please, someone do this for me. I tried, and failed, to get the layout right for the contents list in all browsers at the same time. The semantics of CSS is beyond my comprehension. Cheers, Simon
When the index is generated with a more recent Haddock, you get a search field, which does an incremental search, so this might perhaps be more what you are looking for. A more aesthetical note: We should really get rid of the ugly table/CSS layout mixture, the lower part of the page renders a bit ugly and varies between browsers. Switching to pure CSS should be safe in 2007, I guess.
Please, please, someone do this for me. I tried, and failed, to get the layout right for the contents list in all browsers at the same time. The semantics of CSS is beyond my comprehension.
Well, I'm not a web designer, but I did work with few of them, and it seems to me that you either create a table design in two hours or spend three days trying to create a CSS one and THEN create a table design in two hours.
Hi
I have the following page bookmarked:
Just bookmark: http://haskell.org/hoogle It's not perfect, but it probably solves lots of your problems.
A tip is to use Firefox's search as you type feature if you know the module name.
This will be better supported in Hoogle 4 - but unfortunately degrees etc. are coming in the way of Hoogle development...
A more aesthetical note: We should really get rid of the ugly table/CSS layout mixture, the lower part of the page renders a bit ugly and varies between browsers. Switching to pure CSS should be safe in 2007, I guess.
Replicating actual tables with CSS is a nightmare - you shouldn't use table's for lots of things, but there are sometimes when it really is the best option. Fixing up the CSS and still keeping tables is a perfectly valid option. Thanks Neil
Just bookmark: http://haskell.org/hoogle
It's not perfect, but it probably solves lots of your problems.
And if you use Firefox, you can even install Hoogle as one of the search engines in the upper-right search box. Nice and fast! -Brent
Brent Yorgey wrote:
And if you use Firefox, you can even install Hoogle as one of the search engines in the upper-right search box. Nice and fast!
I've never really understood what the benefit of this is... I mean, Google make "the Google toolbar", but what's the point? Why not just click on the Google bookmark and type in your search? What benefits does installing a special addon provide?
On Mon, 2007-09-10 at 19:51 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Brent Yorgey wrote:
And if you use Firefox, you can even install Hoogle as one of the search engines in the upper-right search box. Nice and fast!
I've never really understood what the benefit of this is... I mean, Google make "the Google toolbar", but what's the point? Why not just click on the Google bookmark and type in your search? What benefits does installing a special addon provide?
Well, for the default Google searchbox the advantage is: Ctrl-K <search phrase> ENTER versus grab mouse .. point ... click ... move hand back to keyboard ... type search phrase, ENTER I never used any of the secondary search bars. Unless I can define a shortcut to access hoogle quickly there's no advantage. However, regarding the modules list. I think it should be easy to have optional javascript functionality to toggle the visibility of the module tree. The default visibility could be customized using a cookie.
Hi
I've never really understood what the benefit of this is... I mean, Google make "the Google toolbar", but what's the point? Why not just click on the Google bookmark and type in your search? What benefits does installing a special addon provide?
You can setup firefox so in the location bar (Alt+D) typing "h query" (without the quotes) will perform a hoogle query. Simply right click in the search box and click "add keyword search" with "h" as the keyword. You can also do the same for Google, which I've been using for years (Opera 5 had this feature!) re: Hoogle not always getting it exactly right, there are a few known bugs floating around which I'm working on. Hoogle can permute the order of arguments though, so that shouldn't be a problem. It doesn't really like Monads, but I wrote Hoogle before I was aware of higher-kinded type classes, so its understandable... Thanks Neil
Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi
re: Hoogle not always getting it exactly right, there are a few known bugs floating around which I'm working on. Hoogle can permute the order of arguments though, so that shouldn't be a problem. It doesn't really like Monads, but I wrote Hoogle before I was aware of higher-kinded type classes, so its understandable...
Overall, I think Hoogle is an increadibly neat tool. I've never seen anything else like it. (But then, how many other languages let you virtually figure out what a function does just by its type signature?) I shudder to think what Hoogle will be like if they ever get round to adding MPTCs, ATs, rank-Ns and existential types to the language standard... Good luck with searching for that! ;-) OOC, how big is Hoogle and how long did it take to do?
Well, for the default Google searchbox the advantage is:
Ctrl-K <search phrase> ENTER
versus
grab mouse .. point ... click ... move hand back to keyboard ... type search phrase, ENTER
I never used any of the secondary search bars. Unless I can define a shortcut to access hoogle quickly there's no advantage.
To search Hoogle I just type Ctrl-K F4 h <search phrase> ENTER. Once you're in the search box, F4 (or alt-up/alt-down) let you select a particular search engine. -Brent
Thomas Schilling wrote:
However, regarding the modules list. I think it should be easy to have optional javascript functionality to toggle the visibility of the module tree. The default visibility could be customized using a cookie.
I don't know how to make cookies work purely in Javascript - presumably there's a way, though. I'm accepting patches! Cheers, Simon
participants (11)
-
Adrian Hey -
Andrew Coppin -
Brent Yorgey -
Ian Lynagh -
Johan Tibell -
Jules Bean -
Miguel Mitrofanov -
Neil Mitchell -
Simon Marlow -
Sven Panne -
Thomas Schilling