Accessing Help

This section describes how Epsilon can help you access compiler help files and similar external documentation. See Getting Help for directions on obtaining help on Epsilon itself.

Epsilon for Unix provides a man command for reading man pages. At its prompt, type anything you would normally type to the man command, such as -k open to get a list of man pages related to the keyword "open". If you don't use any flags or section names, Epsilon will provide completion on available topics. For example, type "?" to see all man page topics available. Within man page output, you can double-click on a reference to another man page, such as echo(1), or press <Enter> to follow it, or press m to be prompted for another man page topic.

You can set up Epsilon for Windows to search for help on a programming language construct (like an API function or a C++ keyword) in a series of help files. Epsilon can link to both .hlp and .chm (HtmlHelp) files. Run the Select Help Files... command on the help menu to select the help files you want to use. This command adds help files to the Help menu, to the context menu that the secondary mouse button displays, and to the list of files searched by the Search All Help Files... command on the help menu. The last command is only available under 32-bit versions of Windows. Edit the file gui.mnu to further modify the contents of Epsilon's menus. Edit the file epswhlp.cnt to modify the list of files searched by Search All Help Files.

If you highlight a word in the buffer before running a help command, Epsilon will search for help on that keyword. Otherwise Epsilon will display either a list of available keywords or the table of contents for the help file you selected.

Standard bindings:

select-help-files

search-all-help-files

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