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 GTK, IDE help is ALWAYS displayed in a CG html-browser because we do not have a way to invoke a third-party HTML-browsing program.)

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 IDE configuration option is not found on the Options dialog, but may be toggled interactively in the list of all IDE configuration options that are shown in the inspector by the Tools | Inspect System Data | CG Configuration Options menu command. Or it can 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)

Copyright (c) 1998-2008, Franz Inc. Oakland, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
Documentation for Allegro CL version 8.0. This page is new in the 8.0 release.
Created 2007.4.30.