So there I was, wandering down the street thinking about :-
- Sometimes being unable to remember custom key sequences that I've configured.
- 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 dillo. Turns 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 :-
(And now of course I need to spend some time writing some help files!)