Help file

[joesh1]

Hi Ryan, I should have thought of this when mentioning that cmd+K didn't bring the help menu up, which you've fixed.

This morning I was testing out the updates and all works fine, however, when testing the tutorials I saw several help commands (ex: print(Player.get_attributes()), which I'm pleased to discover. Why don't you include these in the help file/command, it would be really useful to be able to look up what command you need to find scales, FxList, etc.

I think one thing that I find particularly useful in Sonic-Pi is the possibility to search the data base whilst working. And, as you know, Supercollider (although another beast totally) also has its help system too. FoxDot seems very interesting, but a little more easily accessible help commands/answers would be very welcome I think?

[Qirky]

I agree the help command could use an update. However, there's two things from stopping me have more in depth "help" functionality. FoxDot is still very much in early development and commands etc change all the time so when I have actually bothered to write documentation it becomes outdated in 2 months time so while things aren't set in stone they often go un-documented. The second is that FoxDot is something I work on in my spare time and is a personal project that has been opened up to the community - I don't make any money from it and don't have a patreon site or anything so most of the work goes into the creative expressiveness of the system as opposed to documentation. I would like to spend more time and add a dedicated documentation for the website (which can be opened from the UI as a sort of "help") but it's quite difficult at this point in time.

What I'd love to do is have the docs written in markdown on the GitHub and then pulled and formatted on the website so that they could be contributed to by anyone to an extent but I need to freshen up on my javascript. Sorry if this doesn't quite answer your query but there's still a long long way to go for FoxDot but hopefully it'll get there with the help of others too

[joesh1]

No problem Ryan, I understood that (when getting my feet wet with FD). As you'll have noticed Sam (Aaron) is now running into trouble as he needs some funding to move forwards if he wants to improve Sonic-Pi.

Unfortunately, even though I spend most of my time coding, I don't think I'm really capable of helping on the programming side. However, if you need any other help let me know, you can always contact me directly via mail. Otherwise, one thing that I could maybe start working on would be a list of commands which could eventually be published in a .pdf format. This could be part of the help documentation which comes with FD?

[Chovin]

I'm not sure how you're doing it now, but if you document as you go per commit, you could have autodoc and sphinx generate the docs for you.
Here's an example of a project that does this:

The delete method of the Message class in the docs
It was pulled from here in the code
and this is all the extra documentation needed for the whole Message class

[joesh1]

Hi Chovin, I guess this is what you mean http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/ext/autodoc.html? It certainly looks interesting.

[Qirky]

I tried early on in the project to get sphinx working but failed so ended up writing my own autodoc (which is, ironically, not documented very well at all) which writes documentation in markdown but have had complaints since that was informal and users wouldn't know where to look for the right information. So I'm hoping to do a "reduced" version of the docs that contain the just the essential information on things and some example code along with it for the website (essentially a fleshed out version of http://foxdot.org/start/) - then a user can click Help -> Go to website if to check the documentation.

[Chovin]

what were your issues getting sphinx running? if we can get that running, would it be an option?

[Qirky]

It was over a year ago I believe and can't really remember so I spent an afternoon writing the markdown script. I would definitely be interested in using sphinx and readthedocs or similar.