[Qt-creator] Qt Creator and (lack) Qt Assistant integration

[Eike Ziller]

> On 19. Sep 2018, at 18:44, Szyk Cech <szykcech at spoko.pl> wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> At first I appreciate your effort to integrate context help in to Qt Creator. But...
> 
> I find current solution of F1 key behavior is cumbersome. When I hit F1 first time then I get (if I am lucky) contest help occupied right site (1/3?) of the window. Second F1 hit: I get almost whole window with help.
> 
> Problems:
> 
> 1. When I leave help and navigate in code then there is no way to get back to the help screen (many cases I am hundreds lines of code away from the place I invoke context help and I still want it).

True, when you close the context help on the side you only get it back with context help.

> 2. When I hit F1 once it appears in verid mode commonly with horizontal scroll bar.

You can choose the behavior of context help (on side, in help mode, in extra window) in Options > Help > General > On context help.

> 3. There is no easy (keyboard) way to get back (from one F1/partial window mode) to code without lost context help.

Typing <escape> once will get you back to edit mode without closing anything.

> 4. In two F1/full screen mode shortcuts from Qt Assistant does not work!

Not sure what you mean with that specifically. Bugreports are appreciated.

> 5. Is there any way to open two help documents in Qt Creator?!?

Unfortunately this is currently missing from the “external” help window, and is only available in Help mode.
This simply needs some refactoring: The original code didn’t have the extra help window at all, and that part is still hard-wired to the Help mode with singletons "all over the place".

> To sum up: I think there is no reason to keep this cumber some build in help in Qt Creator. In my opinion far better will be good integration with Qt Assistant via local socket (unix socket or local pipe on WinDos) - hidden by QLocalSocket and QLocalServer.

We would like to provide this functionality in Qt Creator even without an installation of Qt and Qt Assistant. (Well, we could package another Qt Assistant with Qt Creator, but that doesn’t sound great either.)
Btw, context help in Qt Creator actually needs access to the help database to be able to find out which keyword needs to be used to get to a specific help location (this is not uniquely defined by the symbol name...), and the same is true for getting help in the tool tip when hovering. So Qt Creator would still need QtHelp and access to the database (which then would need to be the one from the correct QtAssistant), or all this would need to be implemented through an IPC protocol.

> The only thing which can be restricted by system (or system specific) is to raise Qt Assistant from background. But I have solution for windows based on local socket and sending raised window handle via local socket - I can share this piece of code if you want.

Note that we have different platforms, even when only considering Linux (XCB/Wayland). Not saying that it couldn’t be made to work.

Br, Eike

-- 
Eike Ziller
Principal Software Engineer

The Qt Company GmbH
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eike.ziller at qt.io
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