Mar 072015
 

So there I was, wandering down the street thinking about :-

  1. Sometimes being unable to remember custom key sequences that I've configured.
  2. That my "Help" button on my keyboard was unused.

And I thought that it would be fun to knock up a little application that would pop up a window and show a file. Then I got real, and realised that the application was already written and allowed fancy formatting of the help file(s) – it's called a browser.

Now for a whole bunch of reasons, you probably don't want to use a full blown browser, but something a little simpler and without any fancy controls, and I plumped for dilloTurns out that the "-f" flag turns off the fancy menu and toolbar, so what I needed was to persuade my window manager (Awesome) to run it when I pressed "Help" :-

	awful.key({ }, "Help", function () awful.util.spawn("dillo -f /home/mike/lib/help-files/index.html") end))

If you need help adding that to your Awesome configuration file, you're in the wrong place!

And of course it works :-

2015-03-07_1457

(And now of course I need to spend some time writing some help files!)