fbhelp - Dos (and win ) console help viewer

coderJeff · Site Admin

I've been working on this for a few weeks :

... something for the hardcore dos freaks. :P

fbhelp.exe (dos) and fbhelpw.exe (windows) console help viewer for FreeBASIC manual.

Still lots to do, but I would like to get feedback on how it runs under dos/windows and any feature requests.

Source under a GNU compatible license will eventually be available. Binaries only for this testing release.

Download available from my (Unoffiicial) FreeBASIC Manual page:
http://frontpage.execulink.com/coder/freebasic/docs.asp

Important keys: F1=DocToc, F2=readme, CTRL+X = Exit.

Thanks!

EDIT: Oops. I first built the download with an older snapshot of the wiki. For more recent wiki. Please DL again, sorry.

yetifoot · Master

wow, definately handy for the DOS freaks ;)

rdc · Master

Looks very nice.

Nexinarus · Posted: Jul 15, 2006 2:57 Post subject:

Very nice, coderjeff ;)

DOS386 · Sr. Member

coderJeff · Site Admin

yetifoot · Master

I tend to use 6.22, 7.0 (I think, the one that was with win98), and FreeDOS.

They all seem to work well, but I haven't done a lot, just some quick tests.

DOS386 · Sr. Member

coderJeff · Site Admin

Slightly updated version available: here

Has a close button, a working scroll bar, mouse scrolling delay, and a few other bug fixes. Startup under winnt should work now. In the program, press F2 for the readme and scroll down to read all the keyboard shortcuts.

StopTCPA: good ideas there. Internally, in the program, I added a minimal event model which should allow popup boxes to be done without too much trouble. I didn't do it for this posting though, sorry. I'll put your ideas on the TODO list.

My primary goal is to make the official documentation available in something other than online/html/chm. An editor might be interesting, but it's a lot of work to do from scatch. MystikShadows is working on a dos/win/lin console IDE that looks promising.

rugxulo

Good stuff! I'll have to test it on my old DR-DOS 7.03 P166 and let you know how it works. Major thanks for your hard work! :)

rugxulo · Posted: Jul 25, 2006 16:34 Post subject:

Well, it works pretty well. I have a couple of suggestions (mainly just the first one):

Alt+W (or whatever) -- save topic to textfile
Alt+F4 and/or Alt+X -- alias for Ctrl-X (quit)
swap F2 (help) and F1 (index), add alias Alt+I or Ctrl+I for index
allow cmdline /bw to switch off colors
(distant future?) use Zlib or Mini-LZO to read a compressed FBHELP.DAT

Works pretty darn well as is, though! :-)

coderJeff · Site Admin

Thanks for trying it out. More good ideas. This weekend I will make the changes suggested by you and StopTCPA.

I already did the /bw switch and some of the keystroke re-assignments.

TODO:
* add a mini dialog-box manager.
* show some short-cuts on the status bar at the bottom of screen
* a popup message box to show web links, topic not found, other info.
* save topic to text file.

I thought about compression (even before the first posting) and there is a reserved DWORD in the help file to store the compression method. (it is currently zero). More experimentation is needed, but yes, it would be cool if sometime in the future the help data file was only 300K or something.

Thanks again to everyone for trying this thing out so far. I really appreciate the feedback.

relsoft · Master

looks like the QB help file.

Add this to mystic's IDE and you got retro FB!

Good Job!!!

MystikShadows · Sr. Member

You must have read my mind ;-)....hehe..

DOS386 · Sr. Member

I wrote: