This day’s code includes a bunch of refactoring, some cleanup of regressions introduced yesterday, a new help authoring command and a reminder to self that when it’s late at night in Devember and you’re busy writing code and you still have a devlog post to write, you should probably not distract yourself by writing a forum post to answer a question someone asked eighteen days ago.
In any case, here’s an update on what happened today.
Today’s time was spent doing some integration of what has been done with Sublime so far so that it actually starts becoming if not more useful than at least more accessible. Along the way I fixed a code bug regarding index loading and implemented some new syntax changes. After including some new help for the syntax changes to explain what’s now possible, I also added some new key bindings.
On the whole, things are progressing well and the basics of having internal help is now complete, although there is still much to do.
Today’s changes bring us closer to the goal of being able to more easily author help files for packages. This includes some syntax changes to make things look a little nicer as well as some changes to the presentation of help files in general and a fix for a bug that took a little more time to locate than it should have.
I didn’t get quite as much time to work tonight as I wanted to due to some other stuff going on, but on the plus side there is an image to show what the new changes look like, and it’s not animated (so maybe double plus)?
Today’s changes bring into the mix some new Sublime Text commands that allow us to interact with the help system in a more natural manner, instead of having to manually import the API into the console and invoke commands directly. At least, that’s the general idea. Currently there are not really any bindings set up, so instead we need to use run_command from the terminal to invoke the help system, but at least there’s no need to import anything.
All of the late nights are catching up to me, so in an effort to get to bed before midnight for the first time this month, I’m going to endeavour to make this a shorter development log entry. Saying that hardly ever works, but I’m throwing caution to the windows and immediately jumping to this exciting animated GIF of the major excitement for the day.
While I was doing my daily walk this morning I was pondering the index loading code that I wrote yesterday and what else had to be done. Ostensibly the main thing was to add support for loading the table of contents specified in the index file, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that I was missing some things.
In particular although I had some validation in place to ensure that some aspects of the index were correctly formatted (is the topic list an array? is the first item a string?) there was a bunch of validation still missing. What if someone made the top level structure of the index an array, for example? I pondered the level of checks that would have to happen and how to try and shorten that code as much as possible, and then decided that something else was in order.
As promised yesterday, today’s update is chock full of a complete lack of any sort of stunning visual flair, since everything revolved around working with the code for loading up help index files, which is the first step in being able to jump to links in other files. Some of the development time was spent in hashing out the format of the help index that I want in order to be able to provide the data needed at run time.
Since the code is only a few dozen lines of code, this entry will talk a little bit about how the help system is going to tie together instead.
In order to bring a little more “hyperness” to the project, I drank an excessive amount of coffee to keep me awake after all of the late nights, then sat down and worked on some code changes to allow actually following links. With this in place the system is already a fairly useful help system, assuming that you only want your help to be a single page.
Like yesterday, lets start off with an animated GIF showing link navigation in progress (click to view). For the next few days, work will be done on the core back end code, so this is probably the last day for the immediate future that there will be something excitingly visual to look at.
Today’s bit of coding was fruitful despite my dreading it all throughout the day. Going to bed extremely late for the last two days (coupled by getting up early both times) and setting up Christmas decorations made me want to curl up in a little ball under the table with Walter and go to sleep. However, I virtually signed a probably not legally binding contract, and so coding will (and did) happen.
The changes for this evening include some extra code for helping during testing as well as adding in the ability to navigate between anchors in the current help document. This time around, lets show what’s new first and then talk about it second.
Today’s progress makes help file loading more streamlined going forward and also includes some post processing support for loaded help, which provides the visual enhancements needed to get the help looking the way we want it to. This includes marking text with regions as well as actually modifying the help buffer.
That last part took longer than it should have before I figured out the weirdness that was going on (which is not actually weird at all and actually what you should expect). Everything is all sorted out now though, so it’s back to smooth sailing.