Because recently I am working mainly in Linux and unfortunately there is no good common context help system, I decided to make for Fresh IDE a web search feature.

I tested to use google in "I'm feeling lucky" mode:


It works surprisingly well for Windows API functions, redirecting to MSDN. But unfortunately, it works not so good for other assembly requests.

I tried to add "assembly" to the keyword:

But still the search is not effective enough. For most instructions, Google offers pages with GAS syntax (and from random sites for every instruction). The Linux system calls end on some source code (for example sys_clone: https://lists.openvz.org/pipermail/criu/2013-January/006603.html)

Any ideas what can be done in order to make such help more useful?

Add site:www.linuxapiweb.com
Then the search will limited to that particular site.

Well, this is possible, but not very convenient. This way, the user have to manually choose what site to search for every help request...

for syscalls they are mostly all the same as libc calls
threading being the one that i think of first being different (kernel provides futexes and clone for it)
libc's have manpages (most distros under dev packages)
a list and numbers are in kernel source in /usr/src/`uname -r`/arch/x86/syscalls/
(sources you need to compile drivers and such, so they easy to get)

most progress i made was when internet died for a day and i wanted to code
internets does'nt give much of this kind of data, at least not for amd64 that i wanted to use

Very true! But Fresh IDE still needs good enough help system in Linux. In Windows, combining Win32.hlp and some .chm files works fine, but in Linux there is no such tools. The web browser is the only viewer able to provide help information.

idk how familiar you are with linux
there are man pages, that exist for various command line utilities (and for all libc calls)
then there is "info" that was made by GNU people to replace man (didn't work, but still)

for the kernel API... other then man pages for libc, there is "info libc"
only thing to add is the kernel calling convention

idk, il have to check the kernel documentation if there is more


for teh internets you can try adding "POSIX" or libc

as i said, libc and the kernel API have much in common
ofc there is no malloc from the kernel nor math functions, that might confuse people
direct assembly examples idk (theres some with fasm:))

man pages are too outdated technology. It is 2014 outside.

libc documentation is totally useless for assembly programming, because libc system calls are actually wrappers of the real system calls, with different arguments and return values.

Although, there are several assembly-centric documents about system calls, but most of them are low quality.

Except lscr project. It has very good system calls documentation, but it is development kit (I mean it is offline and the goals of the project are not to provide context help). Anyway, today I published the help pages from lscr on the Fresh IDE site for online use: http://fresh.flatassembler.net/lscr/

What I have been done?

1. Support for .html help files. Fresh scans the file and searches for <a id="keyword"> tags and if the keyword matches it loads the browser on this anchor.

2. Support for ".idx" files - it is simple text file where every line contains KEYWORD=URL pair. The .idx file can be manually or automatically generated.
FreshIDE scans the ".idxfile and If the keyword matches then the browser opens on this URL.

3. The Google search is optional and is only fall-back if the keyword has not be found in any of the offline help files.

After these changes, the context help works pretty adequate in Linux and should works well (but not tested) in Windows.

Any other ideas?