Adding online help for commands

[Rodgers]

I am wondering how difficult it is to add online manual within OpenSees.

Right now a "help" command will display the DOS commands, wouldn't it be nice if it can display the commands available for OpenSees?

The other fancy gymmic is the autocompletion of commands, I found it difficult to remember the commands exactly as it is.

One more feature is to have OpenSees to save commands history into a file.

[silvia]

i'll answer one item at at time:

I am wondering how difficult it is to add online manual within OpenSees.

There is a Tcl editor developed by Stanford researchers, but i don't know it is is still being supported and updated. This editor does have help files.
the on-line manual is at:
http://opensees.berkeley.edu/OpenSees/m ... sermanual/

Right now a "help" command will display the DOS commands, wouldn't it be nice if it can display the commands available for OpenSees?

they are in the above manual

The other fancy gymmic is the autocompletion of commands, I found it difficult to remember the commands exactly as it is.

This is why you should use variables and cut and paste from the manual.
Also, if you type the command, it does tell you what the arguments should be, typically.
There is a Tcl editor developed by Stanford researchers, but i don't know it is is still being supported and updated.

One more feature is to have OpenSees to save commands history into a file.

You really should use a script rather than using the command line.
An output file, however, would be handy, yes.

[Rodgers]

I guess what I am really interested in is some kind of automatic documentation feature.

All the OpenSees Tcl commands are provided by Tcl_AddCommand(maybe not this exact name), and in the body of the command implementation there are several lines of C/C++ codes that parses the input and put them into the corresponding variables.

Is it possible to scan these codes and build an accurate description for each command? This may not be that important for current commands because they've already been documented pretty well. Nevertheless if this gadget is available then the maintenance of that Standford tool may become much easier.

[berktaftali]

One more feature is to have OpenSees to save commands history into a file.

I believe this is possible with the following undocumented command:

Code: Select all

logFile $fileName

Hope this helps...

[Rodgers]

see, if we have a command scanning tool, I will be able to find out that there is actually this "logFile" command.