[Info-vax] Radical command line suggestion

[IanD]

On Friday, March 20, 2015 at 8:41:10 AM UTC+11, JF Mezei wrote:
> 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.
> 
> With man, you have to scroll thorugh pages of text scanning to find if
> one of the switches is what you are looking for.

I would maintain that VMS's help's biggest advantage over man (and man is not that bad but not awesome either) is the Examples

You can wade through the description of help and look at all the possible qualifiers but the short cut is to go for the examples if the syntax is terse and involves stringing things together like /select=size=min:1000

(A lot of this type of stuff can be mitigated away with a decent OO scripting language like Python instead of DCL - couldn't resist this one, lol)

The other thing I would like to see with help is for it to open up in say an smg window or something similar (if we are staying with a terminal based cli), so that when you have finished you are returned to exactly where you were before you looked up help. 
It's annoying to have to then scroll back up to revisit your window context of what you were doing before you engaged in help. The alternative is to have multiple separate windows open and keep one for help related issues

When I got started with VMS, help was the first place where I headed to learn what I could (my idiot manager at the time was a knowledge hoarder and locked away the VMS manuals, I kid you not). No such thing as going online to see the doco back then either. VMS Help was all you had

The ability to set bookmarks / have a breadcrumb trail would be nice as well, so that if you follow a rabbit warren of commands around you could reverse your path all the way back up or simply jump to a bookmark point

Lots of things could be done to modernise Help

As to the OPs post about 'crazy ideas', I don't think any idea is crazy if we want VMS to survive long term, it's going to take crazy long visioned ideas to keep us ahead of the pack, at least in my opinion. Yes, it needs to be viable short term but long term the rest of the world is moving forward and it's pointless trying to compete with other already entrenched OS's on their same turf, we have to dream up crazy new ideas for VMS to have people choose it before the opposition can think of it. I have my own personal ideas about moving VMS towards the HPC space but that's just me it seems :-(

Command completion is nice, it's mandatory in modern IDE's for both efficiency and quality reasons and the idea of having VMS perform command completion for you I think is a great idea. Didn't the Vaxsim utility have some really basic command fixing? RDB has some rudimentary fixes when/if you use the wrong string quotes at times 

As to command completion burning up cpu resources, is this really an issue on modern systems? How many people are actually going to be logged onto a VMS host executing DCL commands at once anyhow? 
By the time we see Help modernised I suspect VMS will be out on x86 anyhow with cpu cycles to burn

Like all things VMS, it could be made select-able so that a user can turn it on/off or have it disabled in their UAF somehow (UAF modernisation is another topic I want to start)

In DCL, maybe turn it off/on with something like 

INTERPRETER/CLI=DCLTABLES/COMMAND_COMPLETION=YES 

(*I'm assuming that in the future VMS will allow switching of a users CLI to other cli's on the fly, one can always dream crazy!)