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Bug 362311

Summary:	[console] Missing help "cheat sheet"
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Equinox	Reporter:	John Arthorne <john.arthorne>
Component:	Components	Assignee:	Lazar Kirchev <l.kirchev>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	major
Priority:	P3	CC:	gunnar, l.kirchev, tjwatson
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	Juno M7
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:

Description John Arthorne

2011-10-28 10:02:20 EDT

Juno M3.

The old console had a handy "cheat sheet" that listed all the available commands, grouped into various logical categories. Next to each command was a one-line summary of what each command did. This was very useful for people like me who only occasionally use the OSGi console and need a refresher on what commands are available.

In the new console, if you type "help" you just get a list of command names with no explanation of what they are. You can then type "help <command>" to find out what each command does, but that involves a ton of extra typing to find out what everything does.

It would be handy to still have that summary command list together with descriptions. Perhaps equinox:help could still offer this, and the default help would use gogo's less useful dump of command names.

Comment 1 Lazar Kirchev

2011-10-29 01:18:33 EDT

Thanks for the bug! 
This is on my list of improvements to he shell. Actually I have already received similar requests, only the bug was missing. 
Probably it will not look exactly like the old "cheat sheet", because there are technical issues with this, but at least displaying all commands with a short description, grouped by provider, is feasible.

Comment 2 Thomas Watson

2012-03-22 08:28:51 EDT

I think this should be a polish item for M7.  Lazar, have you made any progress here?

Comment 3 Thomas Watson

2012-03-22 08:29:05 EDT

*** Bug 375026 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4 Gunnar Wagenknecht

2012-03-22 08:39:13 EDT

We used to teach people to use the "help" command. That's a major usability issue for people new to Equinox. Lazar, let me know when you have something to test.

Comment 5 Lazar Kirchev

2012-04-08 05:10:47 EDT

Fixed with commit http://git.eclipse.org/c/equinox/rt.equinox.bundles.git/commit/?id=b4627b42ebf39cd0dacd35559e33ec58245b0b0a.

Now for each command is displayed the name, the description, scope and parameters. The help for the old-style CommandProviders is displayed as before.

Comment 6 Thomas Watson

2012-04-09 09:18:05 EDT

I'm marking this is fixed.  I opened a separate bug376319 to consider adding a scope option to help.