In the beginning there was Amigaguide, then came Multiview, and then it stopped. We had the beginnings
of a help system on the Amiga, but it was far too limited. There was no standard as to where these
documents were stored, there was no easy access to any one of them without trailing through drawer
upon drawer of your hard drive, there was no way to search your guides en masse for keywords. In
short, the system itself sucked.
Utilities started appearing that addressed some of these issues. You could build an Amigaguide index
of your guide files with some, you could perform a limited search of specific guides with others. Some
worked, some didn't, and none provided the complete solution.
Then came GHelp. It started as another Amigaguide index generation program, but my, how things change.
GHelp will provide you with a hotkey combination by which you can invoke a compact, but extremely
powerful GUI. From here, you can generate and maintain an index of your amigaguide documents, search
the whole list, or a selection to find those guides containing up to 5 keywords, fully supporting
AmigaDOS pattern matching, or search a specific guide for a keyword (again using full AmigaDOS pattern
matching) and produce an index to the specific nodes where the keyword is found, together with a
context quote which maintains working links where required.
Features:-
New in V4.2
OK - so it's not much, but it's often been requested.
- GHelpGUI can now be called from a CLI to search a specific guide for a specific keyword without
invoking the full GUI
- Fixed a bug when searching selected/all guides for keywords, the abort only aborted the current
guide and not the whole search. Now aborts the full search.
- A couple of other minor bugfixes that I did so long ago I can't remember what they were ;o)
New in V4.1
Actually a minor update:-
- I wasn't aware of it, but if your chosen viewer used any parameters (such as the "SCREEN"
parameter of multiview, then these weren't passed back. Now fixed. The VIEWER tooltype can
now optionally take the format VIEWER='sys:utilities/multiview' SCREEN (note the single
quotes.
- Fixed the palette remapping of the image button in the main GUI. Uses newicon.library for
remapping. Also works under OS3.5/3.9 and PIV.
New in V4.0
- Eliminated Searchguide support. I have, instead, now included my own routine which will search
down to node level in AmigaGuide documents, and present the results in an Amigaguide doc,
including links to the matched nodes and a brief "In context" quote. Unlike SearchGuide, my
version fully supports AmigaDOS pattern matching. GHelp also repairs most links within the quoted
lines enabling them to be accessed directly from the results page.
- Fixed a most elusive bug in index generation which caused GHelp to hang. This has also allowed
further code optimisations.
- Added full AmigaDOS pattern matching to keyword searching.
- Added full AmigaDOS pattern matching to index generation.
- Guidelist now supports multiple selection, allowing a restricted search of the Amigaguide
database.
- New tooltype "SHOWSFX" - extended to filter guide/doc/readme suffixes, all suffixes, or show all
suffixes.
- Now supports multiple config files.
- Index loading from anywhere on the gui.
- Added a remove button to remove files from the guidelist without deleting the file itself.
- Further internal optimisations to the code.
- The last search term is now stored in, and retrieved from the config file.
- Finally solved the problem of the Index generation page not being re-sizable, by changing one of
the mui classes.
- Considerably improved index/guide management
- Since one of my other utilities was recently hacked and infected with a virus, GHelp now checks
itself for signs of tampering. If it appears that either GHelp or GHelpGUI have been tampered
with then you will be notified and the program will exit. If this does happen, please contact
me immediately. YOU SHOULD ALSO RUN A VIRUS CHECKER IMMEDIATELY.
- Added install script.
New in V3.1
- Slightly changed the GUI - GHelpGen is now a separate page of the same window.
- Added tooltype "SHOWSFX". You can now decide whether or not the list will show the
.guide/.doc/.readme suffixes or not.
- Fixed a bug in the AND operator. If the keyword wasn't on the first line of the guide, it was
treated as not found - Oops.
- Problems occured on some systems which I've narrowed down to an insufficient stack size. GHelp
now sets its' own stack internally.
New in V3.0
- GHelpGUI and GHelpGEN are now in a single executable, resulting in a smaller size, faster
operation, and less duplication
- Cleaned the GUI up. Now more intuitive to use, and added additional GUI features (progress bars,
proper Busy windows etc.)
- Indices no longer have to be rebuilt from scratch. You can now add a single guide, or all guides
in specified paths as well as re-generating.
- After generating/updating the index, a check is made for duplicate entries, and options to
selectively include duplicates in the final index introduced.
- I'm sure there's more, but details escape me for now. :o)
New in V2.6
- GHelpGen re-written to be completely self contained. AmigaDOS List and Sort commands no longer used.
The re-write has also resulted in an increase in speed of 15 - 20% when generating indices.
- GHelpGen can now be aborted if you wish.
- Introduced multiple keyword and boolean searching
- Fixed a few more bugs in the GUI. Now fully MUI compliant operation, including full keyboard
control, shortcuts, and bubble help.
- Fixed a few bugs in the internals. It should be pretty much bug free now.
New since V2.0
- Completely re-written from scratch
- GUI instead of an AmigaGuide index - in V2.4 rewritten again for MUI
- Search guides facility added
- Dispensed with the ARexx requirement
- The whole package is integrated to work together
- Much more modular
- Simple to use
- Now uses SearchGuide if it's found in your C: directory to allow searching within AmigaGuide
files.
- Multiple indexes, allowing GHelp to be used as a Global file viewer (when used with a utility
such as IDer as the default viewer)
- Easy access to all your Amigaguide documents
- Progressive Keyword searching of all documents
- Support for SearchGuide, so search in specific documents
- MUI Interface
- Commodity
- Hotkey function
Try it, you'll wonder what you did without it.
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