Includes harmonizing the display of options and arguments, standardising
terminology, using the envvar directive more broadly, adding help options to all
commands that support them, simplifying some language, and tidying up multiple
formatting issues.
string documentation is not changed.
Recent synopsis changes move from literal code blocks to
[RST line blocks]. This does not translate well to HTML: it's not
rendered in monospace, so aligment is lost. Additionally, we don't
get syntax highlighting in HTML, which adds differences to our code
samples which are highlighted.
We hard-wrap synopsis lines (like code blocks). To align continuation
lines in manpages we need [backslashes in weird places]. Combined with
the **, *, and `` markup, it's a bit hard to get the alignment right.
Fix these by moving synopsis sources back to code blocks and compute
HTML syntax highlighting and manpage markup with a custom Sphinx
extension.
The new Pygments lexer can tokenize a synopsis and assign the various
highlighting roles, which closely matches fish's syntax highlighing:
- command/keyword (dark blue)
- parameter (light blue)
- operator like and/or/not/&&/|| (cyan)
- grammar metacharacter (black)
For manpage output, we don't project the fish syntax highlighting
but follow the markup convention in GNU's man(1):
bold text type exactly as shown.
italic text replace with appropriate argument.
To make it easy to separate these two automatically, formalize that
(italic) placeholders must be uppercase; while all lowercase text is
interpreted literally (so rendered bold).
This makes manpages more consistent, see string-join(1) and and(1).
Implementation notes:
Since we want manpage formatting but Sphinx's Pygments highlighing
plugin does not support manpage output, add our custom "synopsis"
directive. This directive parses differently when manpage output is
specified. This means that the HTML and manpage build processes must
not share a cache, because the parsed doctrees are cached. Work around
this by using separate cache locations for build targets "sphinx-docs"
(which creates HTML) and "sphinx-manpages". A better solution would
be to only override Sphinx's ManualPageBuilder but that would take a
bit more code (ideally we could override ManualPageWriter but Sphinx
4.3.2 doesn't really support that).
---
Alternative solution: stick with line blocks but use roles like
:command: or :option: (or custom ones). While this would make it
possible to produce HTML that is consistent with code blocks (by adding
a bit of CSS), the source would look uglier and is harder to maintain.
(Let's say we want to add custom formatting to the [|] metacharacters
in HTML. This is much easier with the proposed patch.)
---
[RST line blocks]: https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#line-blocks
[backslashes in weird places]: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/8626#discussion_r782837750
`fish_config theme`:
- `list` to list all available themes (files in the two theme
directories - either the web_config/themes one or
~/.config/fish/themes!)
- `show` to show select (or all) themes right in the terminal - this
starts another fish that reads the theme file and prints the sample
text, manually colored
- `choose` to load a theme *now*, setting the variables globally
- `save` to load a theme and save the variables universally
- `dump` to write the current theme in .theme format (to stdout)
- `demo` to display the current theme
The file is called "config.fish", not "init.fish". We'll call it
"configuration" now.
"Initialization" might be slightly more precise, but in an irritating
way.
Also some wording improvements to the section. In particular we now
mention config.fish *early*, before the whole shebang.
It's a bit weird to *have* to fire up a browser to get fish_config to
choose a prompt.
So this adds a `prompt` subcommand to `fish_config`:
- `fish_config prompt list` shows all the available prompt names
- `fish_config prompt show` demos the available sample prompts
- `fish_config prompt choose` sources a prompt
- `fish_config prompt save` makes the choice permanent
A bare `fish_config` or `fish_config browse` opens the web UI.
Part of #3625.
TODO: This shows the right prompt on a new line. Showing it in-line is awkward
to do because we'd have to move it to the right.
