[Lazarus] "show declaration hints" has more power in it than is really used

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:27:50 +0200
Michael Schnell <mschnell at lumino.de> wrote:

>   On 07/23/2010 01:14 PM, Mattias Gärtner wrote:
> > Zitat von Michael Schnell <mschnell at lumino.de>:
> >
> >>  IMHO, Lazarus should hold a list of all public declarations done in 
> >> the RTL and the LCL and when pressing F1 with the cursor on some 
> >> name, it should show the appropriate help, even if  is not found in 
> >> any unit mentioned in the uses clause - such as it works today. 
> >> (providing a selection list when multiple alternatives are found).
> >
> > It is already on the todo list.
> > See for example the 6th point here:
> > http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_for_education#ToDos
> 
> Maybe this very global text could be enhanced by a more  concrete 
> suggestion like the one above or perhaps  some other that might be more 
> appropriate.

Note:
There is already a tool to see all public declaration: View
CodeBrowser. It does not only list all public declarations of RTL and
LCL, but all FPC packages, your project and all used packages.
Depending on your platform there are about 200 thousand identifiers and
collecting them takes a few seconds to several minutes (speed
mainly depends on your disk speed).
It is invoked for example when you right click on a compile message
'identifier xyz not found'.

F1 should not only show declarations but also topics. F1 should
"simply" ask the installed help databases for the not found
identifier, maybe as keyword search. A simple fpdoc database can not
answer this yet, but lhelp could and Graeme has written yet another help
database.

There are many possibilities. That's why I put a broad todo.

Mattias