use-cg-html-browser

Arguments: ide-configuration

Returns whether the various help commands in the IDE will display information in a Common Graphics html-browser dialog within the IDE, or in a third-party HTML-browsing program. The default value is true on Windows and nil on GTK (see the GTK note below).

An advantage of the html-browser dialog within the IDE (which is titled "Allegro Help") is that you can select text and apply IDE menu-bar commands to it. For example, you could select a code example and then invoke the Tools | Incremental Evaluation command on it directly, rather than first copying the example code to the editor or listener. Or select a class name and then invoke the Tools | Browse Class command. The html-browser is also probably more reliable than the keystroke-emulation technique that we must employ to reuse an single instance of an arbitrary third-party program (see invoke-private-html-browser).

The major disadvantage of the Allegro Help dialog is that the html-widget within it does not provide a string search capability. This appears to be a limitation of the OCX WebBrowser control (and the Mozilla GTK control on Linux) on which the CG html-widget is based. If you use the IDE's string search commands (from the Search menu) in the Allegro Help dialog, you will be presented with options that include displaying the current page in a third-party HTML browser, so that you can do the search there.

This option is located on the IDE 2 tab of the Options dialog, as a check-box with the label "Show IDE Help Within the IDE". It can also be modified programmatically with a form such as the example below. (In either case, the value will be remembered in your preferences file and used in future IDE sessions.)

(setf (use-cg-html-browser (configuration *ide-system*)) nil)

GTK Note

On GTK, the IDE's help facility does not use a CG html browser inside the IDE by default because of the unpredictability of the Mozilla GTK widget on which it is built. Instead the value of this property defaults to nil, which means that Firefox is invoked if the use-private-html-browser CG configuration option is true, and otherwise the URL or file path is simply placed onto the system clipboard so that it can be pasted into an HTML browser program.

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Created 2010.1.21.