It is not obvious that "q" must be pressed to exit help (man pages)

Bug #611141 reported by Mitch Towner
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
CLI Companion
Status tracked in Trunk
Trunk
Fix Released
Medium
CLI Companion Development Team

Bug Description

It is not immediately apparent to the target audience that "q" must be pressed to exit the help function (man pages).

When showing CLIcompanion to a group of four people who were unfamiliar with the terminal (i.e. the target audience for this app) I noticed that they were pressing "ESC", "enter" & "CTRL"+"x". They also tried clicking on the "help" button again. One user closed the app (by clicking on the close "X" window control [top left corner]) & then re-launching the app to workaround this problem.

Once I explained to them that they need to press "q" & then "enter" they were able to continue using CLIcompanion.

"ESC" seemed to be the first option all of these four users tried first. Perhaps we could map "ESC" to exit the man page?

Related branches

Changed in clicompanion:
assignee: nobody → CLIcompanion Development Team (clicompanion-devs)
importance: Undecided → Medium
Changed in clicompanion:
status: New → Fix Committed
Revision history for this message
Duane Hinnen (duanedesign) wrote :

I piped the 'man' command through 'most'. It provides instructions at the bottom of the screen for exiting and scrolling.
'most' is not a default package so this must be added to the dependencies.

Revision history for this message
David Caro (dcaro) wrote :

What if we use the -P (pager) option of man and use less (a more common package that also adds the exit info)?

I had to install most for dependencies today... XD

Revision history for this message
David Caro (dcaro) wrote :

I checked and the man command is the one that adds the status line with the help message (press h for help and q to quit).
So no the pager is no solution, also the machines where I made the tests, the less command does not show the help tooltip :(

I propose adding a status bar at the bottom (maybe above the buttons), where the tooltip is showed, and also we could use it to show more messages (config saved, command added, could not read config file - check for permissions, etc.).

Revision history for this message
David Caro (dcaro) wrote :

Or we could just parse the man output and show it in a popup window (I like this solution).

Also I've found the option -r of man, that allows you to specify a custom prompt, for example: man -r "Press 'q' to exit, 'h' for help" command, translated of course.

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