Context-sensitive documentation search

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SupplyDepoo
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Context-sensitive documentation search

Post by SupplyDepoo »

I have a bit of experience with StarCraft 2 custom map making, and found it incredibly easy to get into. I have had several mod ideas for Factorio and I keep putting off actually trying to implement them and I have been wondering why I am reluctant to do it. I think I figured it out.

When I'm in the StarCraft 2 Editor, I'm often searching for things like functions that I don't know if they even exist. For example, is there a "Camera Target Position" function? Maybe it's called "Camera World Position", or "Player Look-At Coordinate" (ok, I made up this specific example because I couldn't think of a real one right now). You get the point: things can go by different names.

The neat thing about the SC2 Editor is that in any given context (where a specific data type is expected) you can do a text search and it matches against not just the names of things, but also short descriptions which can contain more related keywords. This makes it really easy to find what I'm looking for, and saves me from mistakenly reimplementing things.

One of my biggest wishes for Factorio is a better editor/modding experience like the one for SC2, but I understand why it won't happen (the SC2 Editor is a monstrously complex software). But is there something like this context-sensitive search for Factorio? From what I can tell, code completion only matches against names, and the online Lua documentation is not context-aware and doesn't match against descriptions.

Has someone made a plugin for some editor that can do this? What do you do?

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Re: Context-sensitive documentation search

Post by SupplyDepoo »

Another thing that helps in the SC2 Editor is that functions are grouped by category. By default you search the whole library, but you can click on categories to narrow it down. So in Factorio for example, it would be great if I could search functions by "Trains" category, which would include functions related to locomotives, rails, etc. Searching for "signal" would show everything to do with signals, excluding a bunch of unrelated circuit network stuff.


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