671811 - it isn't easy to copy-paste command line examples in the SDK's documentation

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: Documentation, defect, P3)

Description

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

It isn't easy to copy-paste command line examples in the SDK's documentation.

For example, the Installation doc <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/1.0/dev-guide/addon-development/installation.html> shows how to expand and activate the SDK.

But selecting one line requires character-level selection; one can't simply select the whole line by triple-clicking, because that also selects the prompt.

And selecting multiple lines is not possible, because that also selects one or more prompts.

I've seen similar docs that use a table or other HTML construct to separate prompts from commands, making it easy to copy-paste the commands without getting the prompts.  But I can't find an example right now.

Pages on MDC like this one <https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Developer_Guide/Source_Code/Mercurial> just omit the prompts.

Comment 1

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

(Pushing all open bugs to the --- milestone for the new triage system)

Comment 2

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

While fooling around in installation.md for bug 655466, I added the simplest fix for this, which as you mentioned MDN does, to omit the prompts. I'm fairly sure this is the only file with this problem (actually other files, like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/1.2/dev-guide/addon-development/implementing-simple-addon.html, already omit the prompt).

If you're OK with this, please let me know and I'll close this one.

Comment 3

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

It looks good to me.

Minor nit: the change adds a couple spaces of indentation, which tends to get copied along with the commands when copy-pasting them, and bash has the fairly obscure feature that it doesn't write indented commands to its command history, so this may trip up folks who copy/paste those commands and then try to retrieve them later.

Thus I would recommend using CSS padding rather than space-based indentation to set these apart from the document text.

Comment 4

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

When I was back in there for bug 696273, I removed those leading spaces, so I'll close this. Thanks!