I wanted access to the help facility in Vista for reasons I forget now. I like the integrated search thing and I'm getting into the habit of just pressing the windows button and typing my query. I did this and typed 'help' and enter and what did I get? Windows Help? No. I got something called 'fxri'.
fxri turns out to be an interesting Ruby documentation browser with a built in Ruby Interactive Command Prompt. The documentation browser takes a few seconds to load but gives you very fast keyword filtering on search terms. The documentation displayed is a slightly crude monospaced text display (no hyperlinks) but can't beat the speed of access or the fact that there is a command prompt there to try things out immediately. Crude as it is, I think I prefer it to the approach taken by the web based ruby documentation: Frames? Web 0.5 anybody?
fxri gets the 'fx' part of its name from a gui package called Fox that may be worth investigating one day.
I must try typing more random words into the search and seeing what goodies I can find.
One other Vista note, it seems as if Microsoft are trying to disguise the annoyingly long time it takes for Windows to shut down by claiming to install an update every time.
Must say I'm still liking Vista, but still not enough to pay to upgrade my home pc's.
Peter's Moblog
Hi Peter, Played with Fox a while back but it didn't support printing and had a lot of quirks - so I went with wxwindows, works great on Linix & windoze combined with ruby and a few gems makes a great cross platform toolset. Nice blog, love the graphic design, but you spend way too much time on WoW ;)