Copy from help pages

01 Feb 2010 . Edited: 01 Feb 2010

A couple of suggestions, which would make my life easier but are certainly not high priority!

  1. Currently it seems there is no way to select text in the help files for the libraries in the compilere (when you click on the "gear" symbol next to the library and choose a class). It would be great to be able to do this for copying out the example code snippets for using the different classes - this would be especially handy for a new user or when you are trying to teach somone who is not familiar with programming (my experience was at a scholl I've been helping out at).
  2. Is there anyway those help files could be made to open in a different window, should I want, so that I can have them side-by-side with the code I am working on? - I guess I could just open up a different compiler window thinking about it...

Cheers, Richard.

01 Feb 2010

Most (all?) help pages are duplicated in the Handbook section.

01 Feb 2010 . Edited: 01 Feb 2010

Hi Richard,

Richard Parker wrote:
Currently it seems there is no way to select text in the help files for the libraries in the compilere (when you click on the "gear" symbol next to the library and choose a class). It would be great to be able to do this for copying out the example code snippets for using the different classes - this would be especially handy for a new user or when you are trying to teach somone who is not familiar with programming (my experience was at a scholl I've been helping out at).

This is a known issue and is on our enhancement list; very annoying to have the code right there, but.. can't.. quite... touch... it...

However, you can easily get to the web version. In the library, click the link:

This will open the library repository in a new window.

Then, click "Switch to API view":

and you'll be at the same list of classes, where you can go in to each and happily highlight any text:

The plan is to revise all this, including making it selectable in the IDE, when we upgrade to support doxygen markup; the ultimate plan is for anyone to be able to create their own library documentation.

Simon

01 Feb 2010

@Igor

Thanks for the reminder, I guess there is no reason why I couldn't have another tab/window open with the handbook in. It would just be nice to be able to use the help pages as a quick reference and be able to copy.

@Simon

Thanks for the detailled response at least there is a way to do it - that is almost exactly what I was looking for, I had never noticed the "switch to api view" link - very useful.

Moving over to doxygen is interesting, I guess I had better start marking up my code comments using that style then!

Thansk again.

20 Jun 2010

I discovered this about 5 minutes into the site. It's so odd. The limitation made me feel like I just dont get mbed.

21 Jun 2010

It's actually a bit of a bug which will be fixed soon, nothing more sinister than that! The full docs are at http://mbed.org/handbook/.

21 Jun 2010

Okay, that's fine. Thanks.

Another issue, which I searched for but couldn't find, is Copy and Paste dont work on the Compiler/IDE/Code tab. Windows 7, IE v8.0.7600.16385, update versions: 0; 3283.

I pretty quickly just gave up on mbed because, it turns out, I use Copy Paste a lot to refactor code. A few days later I tried my other old slow computer which runs FireFox and Copy Paste worked. So I am guessing that this is a browser-dependant issue. Ideally the site would fix this on IE because the old slow computer is just that. Old & slow. Let me know if you need me to trry or test anything to help out.