KDE Help System User Manual

# KDE Help System

The KDE help system is designed to make accessing the common UNIX help systems (man and info) simple, as well as the native KDE documentation (HTML).

## Invoking KDE Help

The help system may be started using a URL to display a file, e.g:

kdehelp file:/usr/local/src/qt/html/index.html

URL's have been added for info and man, e.g.

kdehelp info:"(gcc)G++ and GCC"

kdehelp man:strcpy

If no command line parameter is supplied, an index is displayed (currently just has links to info and man directories, but may have links to installed KDE application's help in the future). Alternatively, a file or URL may be opened using menus or dragged from the KDE file manager - kfm.

## Navigating in Help

Navigation in the help system is achieved by clicking on links within the documents and by using the options in the Goto menu and the toolbar.

### Contents

If the help system is started without a starting location supplied on the command line, the Contents are displayed. The first section consists of general information on the KDE project. The second section section deals with specific applications/command documentation. The application and system documentation are divided into three sections:

KDE Applications Help Index
  Native KDE application documentation. All KDE applications have documentation written in HTML. This section lists all the KDE applications with a brief description and a link to the full application documentation.
System Manual Pages
  UNIX man pages are the traditional on-line documentation format for unix systems. Most programs on your system will have a man page. In addition, man pages exist for programming functions and file formats.
System Info Directory
  TeXinfo documentation is used by many GNU applications, including gcc (the C/C++ compiler), emacs, and many others.

At any point you may return to the Contents by selecting Contents from the Goto menu or from the toolbar.

### Back and Forward

These are the history commands. Back moves back to the previous page you visited, while Forward moves you to the next page that you visited. The history list is currently up to 50 locations deep, though this will probably be configurable in future releases.

### Prev, Next, Up, Top

You will recognise these commands if you have used info previously. Info documents are arranged hierarchically with each page called a node. All info documents have a Top node, i.e. the opening page. You can return to the Top node of an info document by pressing Top.

Prev & Next are used to move to the previous/next page at the current level of the hierarchy.

Clicking on a menu item within a document moves you to a lower level in the hierarchy. You may move up the hierarchy by pressing Up.

Man is treated similarly to info, with the section index being the Top node and each man page on the level below.

## Searching

You may search the man pages for a string by selecting Search... from the File menu. Once selected, the search page appears and prompts you for a search string. You may choose to search any of the three help systems: KDE, man, or info. Pressing Submit Search displays a list of matches in each category you selected. KDE matches are listed in order of best match. Man page matches are listed as reported by the apropos command.

Searching info documents has not yet been implemented.