[chimerax-users] ToolInstance context menu displaying help

[Anthony James Schaefer]

Greg and Tom,

We're planning on moving stable versions of my bundle to the toolshed sometime after AaronTools gets put on PyPI. AFAIK, we don't have a set date for that. It's my understanding that part of what makes the toolshed easy is that it automatically installs PyPI dependencies. My bundle's absence from the toolshed has more to do with its dependencies, my tools needing some smoothing, and the bundle as a whole getting fleshed out a bit more - we're even still workshopping the bundle name to some extent.

Tony
________________________________
From: Greg Couch <gregc at cgl.ucsf.edu>
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2020 2:08 PM
To: Anthony James Schaefer <tony.schaefer at uga.edu>
Cc: chimerax-users at cgl.ucsf.edu <chimerax-users at cgl.ucsf.edu>
Subject: Re: [chimerax-users] ToolInstance context menu displaying help

[EXTERNAL SENDER - PROCEED CAUTIOUSLY]

As ChimeraX matures, we are really hoping that you make your tool deliverable through the ChimeraX Toolshed that is accessible via the Tools menu's "More Tools..." option.  Those tool bundles should be semantically versioned releases and reasonably self contained.  The github version should be for development and may or may not need a ChimeraX daily build to work.  Making releases is more work, but will benefit users a lot.

    -- Greg

On 3/27/2020 10:43 AM, Tom Goddard wrote:
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/..." 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<mailto: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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