[racket] help browser other than "open" in OS X

On Thu, Jun 02 2011, Eli Barzilay wrote:

> Three hours ago, Jose A. Ortega Ruiz wrote:
>> 
>> If i've read the code correctly, it's currently not possible, in OS
>> X, to specify a help browser other than "open" (the system's
>> default).  Am i right? And, if so, would you accept a bug report (or
>> even a patch) to make it configurable as in linux? (i use racket
>> inside emacs, and is very useful to set the help browser to a
>> specific elisp function there).
>
> While in general I think that it's good to have such options, this one
> feels wrong.  The thing is that `open' is itself something that should
> be configured to use whatever browser you'd want (including some
> emacsclient thing, if needed).

Well, I disagree.  In general, i don't want Emacs to be my OS X
browser. I just want it to be my Racket documentation browser when i'm
hacking Racket inside Emacs.  Even if i wanted to set 'open' to
emacsclient, when i browse Racket help pages i want to fine-tune how
they're opened (e.g., reusing a single tab), and the best place to
express such fine tunning is in an elisp function called by Racket's
browser.

And, IMO, it's not only for Emacs-heads that the option is useful: one
might want to have a dedicated browser for Racket help because, say,
Firefox displays Rackets manuals nicer than Safari, or quicker, or
whatever.

> (BTW, if you're talking about the w3m thing, I've tried it for a
> while, and it's pretty unstable.)

I'm talking about emacs-w3m, yes.  I've been using the CVS version for
many years now, without any stability problems (of course, it's useless
for sites that *need* flash or javascript to work at all, but i guess
i'm lucky i don't visit many of those).  At any rate, when using Emacs
to code in Racket, i find browsing the documentation inside Emacs
extremely convenient (and stable).

Cheers,
jao
-- 
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 - Kristian Wilson, Nintendo Inc.