Help With Commands

When working specifically with commands and FISH intrinsics, there are facilities in addition to the documentation (or integrated with the documentation) that are of use.

Inline Help

The Inline Help facility is available at the command prompt in the Console pane and in any file (data, FISH, etc.) loaded in the Edit pane. It provides an interactive tool for building commands and directly accessing help for commands and FISH functions. Following a stepwise path for command construction is a useful mechanism for learning commands and becoming familiar with their keywords.

Context-Sensitive Help

In the editor or in the command prompt, pressing F1 activates context-sensitive help. If the line currently containing the cursor is a command, the reference information for that command will be shown/opened in the documentation. If the line represents FISH and the cursor is positioned on a valid intrinsic, the documentation for that intrinsic will be shown.

Question Mark

While working at the command prompt, typing ? and pressing Enter will show a list of keywords available at the current cursor position. This is similar to the Inline Help facility, though simpler and less persistent — the user must invoke the ? command each time the list of keywords is needed.

Search

Every page in the documentation contains a search bar at the top right end of the document header. The search bar will return match results across the entire document set. The box uses a default logical “or” for all terms entered in the box. Phrase searching is not available.