[GRASS-dev] [grass-code patches][280] Fix Help button in gis.m raster/vector display conf locks up gis.m

[Hamish]

Paul Kelly wrote:
> 
> IMHO this is a feature of g.manual, rather than a bug in the GUI. If
> you run g.manual from the command-line you get the same situation -
> the command prompt is unusable until the browser is closed again.
> This has annoyed me many times but I never did anything about it as I
> considered it a feature rather than a bug---if you run g.manual -m
> (for man page rather than HTML output) the terminal window is used
> for reading the help pages so it would be impossible to use it
> anyway. An historical feature IMHO, but I agree also that it would be
> desirable to change it.
> 
> I think though rather than patching the GUI, a better solution (which
> will also benefit command-line users) would be to change g.manual so
> it spawns the help browser and then exits, rather than waiting for
> the user to close the browser before exiting as at present.


I had applied such a g.manual& patch in the past, but it was reverted
after we discovered that some people were using text based browsers
(lynx, links) to view the help pages, and this caused problems for them.

that discussion:
  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.grass.devel/6702

FWIW, In my ~/.grass.bashrc I export GRASS_HTML_BROWSER=dillo, which is
Very Fast (and flags html bugs) but noisy to stderr. I guess folks using
a text based web browser for the help pages could use man instead of
lynx.

Also, I never managed to get the command line options right so firefox
would open a new window in the current workspace; if used for GRASS help
it opens the page in the current tab a an existing firefox in another
workspace. I've the same problem with Googlizer.
  mozilla -remote "openurl(http://www.mozilla.org)"

  http://www.linux.org.uk/~telsa/BitsAndPieces/googlizer.html
   (nice little tool- highlight a word and click on the "G" icon
    on the taskbar to do a search for that word. useless triva:
    the author is Alan Cox's SO)

Also, for me, "man $module" works the same as "g.manual -m $module"
but with less keystrokes.


Hamish