Help

Delphi Help peaked somewhere around the late '90s. A big part of this is the seemingly compulsive changes made to the standard Windows help systems. (And it's not just Delphi. It often seems to me like the Help systems go backward rather than forward.) I mean, it's probably not their fault that the help system takes forever to come up and the text pane of the help window sometimes needs to be clicked a couple of times before it respects the mouse wheel on my laptop, but that makes it no less annoying.

At the same time, it's certainly weird that Delphi doesn't even carry its own help over from previous versions. For example, if you pull up the help for FindFirst (to find files) in D7, you get a nice, detailed explanation complete with some code. The code hasn't substantially changed. Since Windows 3.1. The ability to get to related links is way behind the older Delphi.

This is not a minor problem. I had serious difficulty finding the topics I needed.

I was prepared to harangue a bit also about why the flyover hints can quote chapter and verse about where my code comes from, where the methods are declared originally and so on, but if I use the “context sensitive” help, I had to choose between 400 similarly named items from all the tools. Mysteriously, however, this problem vanished on my laptop after a few weeks, and never materialized on the other machines. (If I knew what had changed, I'd tell you how to fix it.)