[chimerax-users] ToolInstance context menu displaying help

[Tom Goddard]

Hi Tony,

  Seems like the simplest solution would if we made the help command handle http/https urls so I added that, in tonight's ChimeraX builds. So in our ToolInstance class you can just define an attribute help = "https://github.com/ <https://github.com/>..." so the context menu Help button on your tool will show your web site docs.

	Tom


> On Mar 26, 2020, at 11:01 PM, Anthony James Schaefer <tony.schaefer at uga.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> can tools' "Help" option in the context menu be changed to use `ToolInstance.display_help` instead of running the `help` command? I'd like to keep most of my documentation on GitHub. The `help` command cannot open URLs, so I thought I'd overwrite my tools' `display_help` methods to use `open` instead. However, I discovered this method isn't used anywhere. 
> 
> I've tried changing `_show_context_menu` in chimerax.ui.gui (around line 2087) to `help_action.triggered.connect(ti.display_help)`. It seems to behave the same for all built-in tools. 
> 
> I understand there might be reasons to not do this (e.g. users might not be able to connect to the internet). I'd like to keep stuff on GitHub because I can make a page on a GitHub wiki page faster than an HTML doc. Regardless of how tools' help pages get shown, I'd like to have examples of what my bundle can do on the GitHub wiki. To that end, my GitHub wiki could serve a dual purpose: a showcase and documentation.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Tony
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