Getting Help

Documentation / Blueprint Desktop Help

• Overview of the Blueprint Desktop
• Getting Help
  • Click for Help
  • Using the Help Viewer
• Keys and Shortcuts
• Hints & Shortcuts
  • Getting Around the Desktop
  • Windows Without the Title Bar
  • Desks
  • Tiling
  • When a Menu Entry Is Greyed
• The Settings Books
• Legal Notice
  • License
  • Trademarks
  • Third-Party Components

Other cards

• Copyright Information

Getting Help

Every Blueprint application carries a Help menu at the right-hand end of its menu bar. The entries are fixed, in this order:

• Click for Help, bound to Shift+F1
• Overview
• one or more topic entries specific to that application
• Index
• Keys and Shortcuts
• Product Information

The first entry does not open a window at all; see Click for Help. Everything below it opens this viewer on a topic: see Using the Help Viewer.

Two different things called help

It is worth separating them, because they are separate mechanisms.

• Click for Help is IN the application. It arms a mode; rolling the pointer over a control shows one short sentence about that control. No other window appears.
• The Help Viewer is a SEPARATE program. It shows whole topics, with a contents list you can browse and search.

On IRIX these were the same split: context help was drawn by the application itself, while the topic viewer was /usr/sbin/sgihelp, which ran once per session and answered requests from every application.

Preformatted example

cyhelp --book Blueprint --topic getting-help
cyhelp --list