[Info-vax] Radical command line suggestion

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Stephen Hoffman skrev den 2015-03-20 12:47:
> On 2015-03-19 21:41:08 +0000, JF Mezei said:
>
>> On 15-03-19 17:29, mcleanjoh at gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> It should also be remembered that HELP has the advantage that most VMS
>>> commands correspond to plain English,
>>
>>
>> Nop. HELP's main advantage over man is the list of qualifiers below
>> generic description of command, and you can then type which qualifier you
>> want info on.
>
> That is, if you're familiar with HELP...

And if you are not, $ HELP HELP

>
> As for navigating a list of qualifiers within HELP, that works if you know
> what the qualifiers do or which one(s) you need to use.  As a reminder.
> Otherwise, you can end up using * to display them all, and with no search
> and no reverse paging and such...

Any (all I'd say) terminal emulators (does anyone use anything else?)
has large scrollback buffers.

And simple searaches in the PDFs works also just fine.

>
> If anyone here thinks the HELP context is good and cannot be improved,...

Kicking in open doors. Have *anyone* said anything else?
Anything/everything can always be improved, of course.

>
> As for more modern alternatives, running a VMS HELP server...

There are a number of web interfaces available for VMS HELP.
Here os one: http://wasd.vsm.com.au/Help

Click "DIRECTORY" and then "Explode" and you get what more or less
looks like a man-page... :-)

He, just found out that that HELP script was default enabled on
WASD, so here is my office server: http://jescab2.dyndns.org/help

Generally speaking, I find the content of the Rdb help pages to be
more complete then for the base VMS system. Check as an example
the RMU BACKUP DATABASE page:
http://jescab2.dyndns.org/help?key=RMU73~Backup~Database

Check the volume of the "Usage notes" and the 20 different
backup "examples" with different scenarios.

And finaly, that help-interface also has a fulltext search option
on every page...