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by dcminter 2219 days ago
The VMS operating system had a standardized command line help UX. Typing HELP gave you an overview of commands available (Curses style) and you could drill down into more specific commands from that.

If you knew the command but not the flags then you could add the HELP flag to get more and more specific information.

See page 1-18 and 1-19 of the user guide: https://www.isis.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/vms-user-manual.pdf

We had a VMS cluster at college and I found it to be a very nice approach. Quite a bit better than man pages and a lot more consistent in my opinion.

Some of them had easter eggs tucked away in them of course, such as the Datatrieve Wombat: https://www.ibphoenix.com/resources/documents/history/doc_29...
3 comments
doctor_eval 2219 days ago
ISTM that Curses style applications are not really CLIs, but GUIs implemented using character cells instead of pixels.

In a sense, the help pages are a super-thin GUI on top of the underlying CLI.

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downerending 2219 days ago
On the one hand, I recall that fondly. On the other hand, a modern Linux box might have thousands of commands, and I'm not sure that VMS HELP could handle that well.
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a1369209993 2219 days ago
It sounds almost exactly like the unix (1)man command actually, and, well:

  $ ls /usr/share/man/man1/ | wc -l
  2997
I'd say that qualifies as thousands (plural).
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downerending 2219 days ago
The difference, as I recall it (and it's been decades), is that VMS HELP tries to display all of the commands in a curses-like screen. That kind of works for a few hundred commands, but not thereafter.

Unix has things like 'man -k', but those ultimately output into a pager, which is well-designed to deal with quite long lists.

I do miss HELP and EDT, but they're hopelessly outmatched by modern tools.

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a1369209993 2219 days ago
> VMS HELP tries to display all of the commands in a curses-like screen. That kind of works for a few hundred commands, but not thereafter.

Ah, yes, point. I was more pointing out that it's possible to "handle that well" (or at least not terribly; unix is like democracy), rather than any disagreement over how well HELP itself handled it in practice.

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jsrcout 2219 days ago
And VMS' printed documentation was fantastic. You could practically learn C by reading the compiler doc. It really went above and beyond.
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