[Info-vax] Enhancements or replacement for current VMS HELP ?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2017-07-13, stubbefekko at gmail.com <stubbefekko at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Do you know about FSHELP. https://www.oooovms.dyndns.org/fshelp
> It does have search capability Even over multiple help files) and smg full screen (hence the FS) display

I didn't but I've now had a quick look at it.

I like the idea, but the user interface does not "flow" as well as
it should. Here is some feedback and suggestions which may be useful.

1) After the text for the topic has been shown, the available
sub-options (such as the topic's qualifiers) does not appear until
you type something. The topic text and the qualifiers should always
be displayed on the screen at the same time and you should be able
to move through either at the same time.

The model I have here is slrn which manages to display both the list
of messages in the thread and the current message text at the same
time and manages to do it very cleanly.

2) I kept getting caught by pressing the tab key to try to move to
another option and ending up at the list of help libraries instead.
Tab should behave closer to the standard behaviour for today's programs.

3) A big problem is with how searching the child topics works. You are
asked one-by-one if the current match is what you are looking for.
Instead, the list of matches should be populated into it's own frame
and the find results should simply become another frame in the viewing
tree.

That way, you could select a result from the find list, view it and
then return to the find list to select another result. When you are
finished with the find list, you just close it which returns you to
the parent topic frame.

This method also allows you to have multiple sets of find results in
the view tree because each different set of results would simply
be in it's own frame in the view tree.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world