Help!

One of the most requested features for VL ever since was the support for help-patches. Obviously they had to come back, but it took us a while to figure out how exactly. One of the brainstorming sessions at /blog/link-summercamp-2019-exit was especially helpful to sort out the details. Thanks everyone for your input…

Help Patches

So for the user it is just as before: Press F1 on a node that you need help for. Now what happens is:

• If a help-patch is found, it is opened and a bubble indicates the node you were looking for
• If no help-patch was found, a bubble indicates that no help-patch was found

Help patch was found…

No help patch available…

In both cases, you can now optionally opt-in for more help: Click the bubble to open the help browser showing the nodes Node Info.

Node Info

Shows some info about the node plus 3 lists of how-to patches this node is used in:

• most relevant (the dedicated help-patch)
• still relevant
• list of other patches using this node (automatically generated)

This should increase the chance of finding good info about how a node can be used in different scenarios.

When “follow mode” is active, you can click around in the patch and always get the node info to the last selected node.

Help Flags

Creators of libraries who want to provide help patches now use help flags to indicate relevance for a node. Read all about using help flags in the graybook.

Available for testing in latest previews!