Help System

Inner workings of the help system

The help system is what every shell uses, invoked by the unified help command available for every type of shell. The function responsible for showing help entries or command usage and some extra help is HelpSystem.ShowHelp() in the Nitrocid.Shell.ShellBase.Commands namespace. Explore with us the mechanics of the help system below.

General help

When the user requests the help command in any shell, the above function gets called, querying the current shell type (Shell.CurrentShellType) as discussed previously.

The function gets all the commands, including the unified ones, from the command type, but hides all the hidden commands (commands that are flagged with the CommandFlags.Hidden flag). It also takes care of the modded and aliased commands.

The help system then prints the list of commands to the console.

Some of the shells implement too many commands, potentially requiring you to either wrap its output using the wrap command, or turn on the simplified help from the kernel settings.

Command help

If the user specified a command when calling the help command, the help system extracts the help definition and all the command usages.

It extracts from these values found in the CommandInfo class:

• HelpDefinition: The brief summary of what the command does

• CommandArgumentInfo: The command argument info that supplies the below information:

  • .Arguments: Defines the command arguments

  • .Switches: Defines the command switches

  • .RenderedUsage: Defines the rendered usage to be printed for a command

The rendered usage has the following characteristics:

• For required switches, they're surrounded with the < and the > marks. Switches that are not required are surrounded with the [ and the ] marks instead.

• Switches that require values don't have the [ and the ] marks surrounding the =value part, indicating that the switch needs a value.

• For required arguments, they're surrounded with the < and the > marks. Arguments that are not required are surrounded with the [ and the ] marks instead.

• For numeric arguments, a marker is shown indicating that it only accepts numbers.

• For switches that conflict, they're put in a group, such as [-switch1|-switch2].