In the recent thread "gnu emacs verses xemacs [sic]" on comp.emacs, I
listed off several ways in which I consider XEmacs to be superior to
Emacs. (Yes, I seem to be turning into an XEmacs elitist. I wonder how
that happened?) When one of the Emacs developers claimed that Emacs was
"just better", I asked him for something concrete to consider.
One of the only two concrete responses I got [1] was that Emacs has
hyperlinks in *Help* buffers, but XEmacs doesn't. Well, we can't have
that, can we? Over the weekend, I looked at how Emacs implemented the
hyperlinks. I didn't like it. (I *told* you I was turning into an
XEmacs elitist!)
It looked to me like the capabilities of view-less would make it much
easier to do this than it is in Emacs. Attached is the result of my
effort. I've used it for awhile today and it hasn't exploded yet. Give
it a whirl. If it doesn't explode for anybody else either, I'll submit
a patch.
Note that I rearranged some stuff and made some trivial alterations from
the existing help.el in order to reduce the size of the diff with Emacs'
help.el, in an attempt to make future synchs easier.
Notes:
[1] For those who are curious, the only other concrete response I got
was that Emacs has transparent data types, but XEmacs has opaque
data types. I'm not even convinced that this is accurate, much less
an advantage for Emacs, the ensuing discussion on comp.emacs
notwithstanding.
--
Jerry James, who will get back to studying the module code now that that
itch has been scratched
Attachments:
- help.el
(application/emacs-lisp — 69.4 KB)