D8211: KDevelop/Documentation : implementation of a QTextBrowser-based viewer

[Aaron Puchert]

aaronpuchert added a comment.


  In https://phabricator.kde.org/D8211#157186, @kossebau wrote:
  
  > And "more advanced rendering code" still makes sense in an integrated development environment, at least to me, I see rendering power orthogonal to being part of IDE. Actually I consider a separate general browser application an inferior solution, as it does not allow to be properly integrated into kdevelop project/session management (project/session specific bookmarks, browsing history, tight control about location in UI etc).
  
  
  Just my two cents: I don't care that much about bookmarks or having the documentation within the IDE itself. I consider the most important feature that I can hover over a function in the code, do one click and directly get to the documentation, without copying the name, without typing anything.
  
  The main reason why the integrated viewer makes sense for me is to view man pages, which I can't view in the browser. At least not offline. So that is nice. Not only because I don't have to type `man ...` in the terminal, but also because it looks nicer than on a terminal. But fully-fledged HTML docs, possibly with advanced CSS and JavaScript? I don't see any reason to not use an external web browser. Browsers are specialized to display web pages, and it's really hard to do a better job there, regarding the actual display, interactivity, or additional features like bookmarks and history.
  
  For me the purpose of integrating something is not to avoid leaving the window, but to streamline the workflow. Take compilation as an example: when there's an error, I click on it and get to the piece of code that caused it. This makes fixing compiler errors a lot easier compared to compiling from the terminal. Similar for debugging: I find a mistake, and fix it directly. I don't need to search for a file and scroll to the problematic line, I'm already there.
  
  But what is the value of integrating documentation, apart from not having to leave the window? The integration with the code: being able to quickly get the documentation for a piece of API I'm using. But that doesn't exclude using an external application to actually view the documentation.
  
  I'm getting a bit off-topic here, so to sum it up: Regardless of the technical merits of QWE and QWK, I don't see a problem with having a somewhat simplified documentation renderer within KDevelop itself, possibly referring to external applications when it gets too hard.

REPOSITORY
  R32 KDevelop

REVISION DETAIL
  https://phabricator.kde.org/D8211

To: rjvbb, #kdevelop
Cc: croick, kossebau, aaronpuchert, flherne, arichardson, apol, kdevelop-devel, geetamc, Pilzschaf, akshaydeo, surgenight, arrowdodger
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