New help system

[vefatica]

Nice! ... especially the single instance.

But can it be made to

1. remember the last view of the Contents/Index/Search pane (or always open with a chosen view)? I generally prefer the index.

2. be made to show the pane mentioned above when I've gone directly to a topic?

 

[vefatica]

Another nice thing ... all the _INTERNALVARs are together in the index.

Another bad thing ... the index doesn't respond to typing a keyword.

 

[vefatica]

And ...

You can't navigate TOC, Index, or search results with Up/Down.

It doesn't remember the position of the splitter

 

[Charles Dye]

You created your own help viewer? I'm impressed!

 

[vefatica]

You created your own help viewer? I'm impressed!

If that's so, then feature request's ought to be implemented quickly ... eh? :-)

 

[rconn]

Nice! ... especially the single instance.

But can it be made to

1. remember the last view of the Contents/Index/Search pane (or always open with a chosen view)? I generally prefer the index

No.

2. be made to show the pane mentioned above when I've gone directly to a topic?

No.

 

[Charles Dye]

But can it be made to [...]

2. be made to show the pane mentioned above when I've gone directly to a topic?

No.

I think it could, and pretty easily. A command like help dir gets massaged into tchelp.exe dir.htm , right? I'll bet you could add an option, say /I, that prepends an "index.html?" to the argument; so e.g. help /i dir launches tchelp.exe index.html?dir.htm .

 

[Charles Dye]

Any chance Control-F could be enabled? I miss it already....

 

[vefatica]

There's just too much functionality missing in the new help.

A couple of rather heavy-handed tricks gets rid of the multiple instance problem in v19. I wish I had thought of them a long time ago. No doubt Rex could do the same a bit more elegantly.

alias help `taskend /f %@pid[hh.exe] 2> NUL & *help`

INT WINAPI KEYHANDLER( LPKEYINFO lpki )
{
   if ( lpki->nKey ==  F1 || lpki->nKey ==  CTL_F1 )
   {
      WCHAR szCmd[64] = L"TASKEND /f %@PID[hh.exe] 2> NUL";
      Command(szCmd, 0);
   }
//...
}

 

[rconn]

Any chance Control-F could be enabled? I miss it already....

No. Unless you can convince Microsoft to add it to their HTML renderer ...

 

[rconn]

There's just too much functionality missing in the new help.

A couple of rather heavy-handed tricks gets rid of the multiple instance problem in v19. I wish I had thought of them a long time ago. No doubt Rex could do the same a bit more elegantly.

alias help `taskend /f %@pid[hh.exe] 2> NUL & *help`

INT WINAPI KEYHANDLER( LPKEYINFO lpki )
{
   if ( lpki->nKey ==  F1 || lpki->nKey ==  CTL_F1 )
   {
      WCHAR szCmd[64] = L"TASKEND /f %@PID[hh.exe] 2> NUL";
      Command(szCmd, 0);
   }
//...
}

Your cure is even worse than the disease!

The new help doesn't kill previous instances; it adds a new page so that you can go forward & back between all of the help you've invoked.

Dropping CHM isn't optional -- Microsoft isn't supporting it anymore. So the choice is either webhelp connecting to a remote server, webhelp with a few thousand local help files, or webhelp in a single file with an integrated viewer. There are no other choices.

 

[rconn]

Another bad thing ... the index doesn't respond to typing a keyword.

That's the way webhelp works.

 

[rconn]

And ...

You can't navigate TOC, Index, or search results with Up/Down.

That's not supported in WebHelp. The up/down keys do *not* select entries, they (sometimes, but not always) scroll the window.

It doesn't remember the position of the splitter

The help is optimized for context-sensitive help (99% of help usage), so contents / index / search is normally hidden to maximize window space (unless you do a HELP with no parameters).

 

[vefatica]

Your cure is even worse than the disease!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. The HTML help has all those features that you say the new help doesn't support. So I gave up forward-backward navigation to have a single instance; I didn't use that often anyway. But I still have the index always showing, a keyword box that takes me directly to a topic in the index, a splitter that remembers its position, Ctrl-F search in the document window.

Oh yeah, it also doesn't remember the number of results per page in the search pane.

 

[rconn]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. The HTML help has all those features that you say the new help doesn't support. So I gave up forward-backward navigation to have a single instance; I didn't use that often anyway. But I still have the index always showing, a keyword box that takes me directly to a topic in the index, a splitter that remembers its position, Ctrl-F search in the document window.

Oh yeah, it also doesn't remember the number of results per page in the search pane.

If you want the unsupported CHM help, you can stay with v19. I will not be updating it for v20.