[Bf-committers] Integrated help with search dialog

[Keir Mierle]

I started playing around with 2.5, and it's fantastic. I want to start
writing a UI for tracking; but I need a 2.5 starter project. Here's what I
propose adding:
When in the 'search' dialog, display a detailed explanation of the selected
item next to the list of 'hits' for the current search term.

This will involve 1. Adding code to display an explanation. 2. Adding an
extra "help" member to actions (optional). 3. Adding an option to turn the
extended help off.

I'm not qualified to do #2, but I imagine with some help from the community
we could make reasonable inline docs which are more detailed than tool tips,
but not as complete as the manual. Think "visual assist" in Eclipse or
Visual Studio where the function documentation, along with arguments, is
displayed when you start to call it in a file.

Not all actions need extended help, but some do. Will this annoy experienced
users? Yes. Will new users love it? YES! Sometimes it's  not obvious what
you want to search for.

Also: will 2.5 support loading video anytime soon? I'll need to load videos
for tracking with libmv.

Keir