Clicking Help on first screen does nothing

[jidanni]

It's the user's very first use...

$ grass

Then click Help. Nothing happens. Some error message should appear somewhere.

Maybe this help button should be greyed out unless the current screen is doing a action that has a help page.

[neteler]

Replying to jidanni:

It's the user's very first use...

$ grass

Then click Help. Nothing happens.

That's unexpected. It should open a browser and therein the helptext.html.

It respects the env variable GRASS_HTML_BROWSER and, if undefined, it searches for numerous candidates:

• see ​https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/blob/master/lib/init/grass.py#L678

Maybe your's is missing?

Some error message should appear somewhere.

Maybe this help button should be greyed out unless the current screen is doing a action that has a help page.

The question is: which operating system do you use? And: is any web browser installed?

[jidanni]

OK, today it is working. Standard Debian sid install. BROWSER=chromium. Maybe it is now working because I have initialized the databases, etc. However a vanilla

# su - some_vanilla_account
$ BROWSER=chromium DISPLAY=:0 grass
Starting GRASS GIS...

(gis_set.py:16417): dbind-WARNING **: 01:53:33.208: Couldn't register with accessibility bus: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

and then clicking Help does nothing.

[jidanni]

Same with

$ GRASS_HTML_BROWSER=lynx DISPLAY=:0 grass
$ GRASS_HTML_BROWSER=chromium DISPLAY=:0 grass

[neteler]

Probably you have to export the variables?

[jidanni]

Putting them on the command line exports them.

$ a=b set|grep a=b
$ a=b env|grep a=b
a=b

[neteler]

I guess, in your case, it is more related to #3964

[neteler]

Ticket retargeted after milestone closed

[wenzeslaus]

If you have xdg-open available, this should just work. It's the default in grass.py for all systems except Windows and macOS.

I'm getting some strange behavior when I actually set the variable:

GRASS_HTML_BROWSER=firefox grass
GRASS_HTML_BROWSER=chromium grass

However, in that case, not even g.manual is working. Anybody else observing this? If yes, can you just open a new issue on GitHub for that?