[downerending]

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.

[a1369209993]

> 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.