
The FB manual is available for off-line usage as a .chm file. Chm readers can operate just one file. They cannot open two or more files at once.
When writing big projects this is an issue since you often need more than one documentation. One for FB and one for each library your code depends on. You might open two or more browsers with different manual files. But in this case you cannot use the context-sensitve help function in your IDE (or you have to do a lot of configuration work to choose the right instance for looking up the keyword).
A better choise is the GNOME reader Devhelp. It can find keywords in a bunch of manuals (called books). Each book is installed in a folder, several folders are stored in the devhelp directories.
The FB manual is now available as a Devhelp book:
- freebasic_En-0.23.0.zip (1.38 MB)
freebasic_En-0.24.0.zip (1.49 MB)
freebasic_En-0.90.1.tar.bz2 (711 kB)
Installation (Debian)
To use these books you first need a Devhelp installation
- sudo apt-get install devhelp
- ~/.devhelp/books
- /usr/share/gtk-doc/html
The links inside the pages are still working like in the original .chm file. I added a new feature: the FB logo at the upper right corner on each page is a new link to the overview page (the one shown in the picture above).
Usage in Geany
For context-sensitive help in Geany IDE set a context-action in menu 'Preferences -> Tools: Context action:'
devhelp -s '%s'
When pressing the context-action key (defaults to F12) Geany should make Devhelp showing the page for the keyword under the Geany cursor. If Devhelp isn't running yet a new instance will previously be started. In this case devhelp searches case sensitive if any upper case character is included.
If you want to search case-insensitive you have to convert the keyword to lower case characters. I use this script
Code: Select all
#! /bin/bash
# Startet devhelp
devhelp -s $(echo $@ | sed 's/[[:upper:]]/\L&/g')
- calldevhelp '%s'
Edit:
Updates to fbc 0.24, 0.90.1