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There are countless issues open against Netbeans' help system and from personal experience I shudder at having to use it. It's sucked for a long while now and I don't foresee that changing anytime soon. Might I suggest the following? 1) Dump all the help data into a Wiki on the Netbeans site. 2) When a user requests help, redirect him to the appropriate page on the Wiki The benefits are three-fold: 1) Better searching capability: the current system sucks and there is no way you're going to do a better job than Google. 2) Better user interface: JavaHelp has a horrible UI and again I think it is much easier for you to just use a Wiki until you have time to come up with a better UI. 3) Users can improve the help by contributing their own articles, something which they can't do with the existing system. The only downside I see is that this requires always-on internet connectivity but I suspect this isn't a big deal. You could always implement a two-tier system like Visual Studio does: have a local help system and an online one. Only resort to the local (potentially older) copy if no internet access is available.
I think this issue is a question of the personal taste. I have no problem with the NB6.1 help. The idea of community contributing to the documentation that would be available in everyones IDE is also little strange to me, I am not sure if that would work well. IMHO, this issue is invalid, but I will leave it and I will just reassign it to the "documentation" sub-component of "IDE" componet...
Reassining
The idea of migrating from javahelp to wiki-type of help has been around for some time, and some work was even done. Technically, this is possible. But whether this will be more useful? About benefits: 1) Better searching capability: Agree. Web search is far more advanced than the javahelp one 2) Better user interface: this is a personal preference, probably. Difficult to undoubtedly state that JavaHelp has a horrible UI 3) Users can improve the help by contributing their own articles. Users can contribute their own articles to the nb wiki right now. As for javahelp, we are trying to keep the help system consistent for various modules. In a wiki scenario, we cannot spend much time on moderating/correcting/testing the contributions to online help. However, this enhancement request can be open as a food for future investigations.
+1 for transferring the JavaHelp to a web-based location (and limiting the JavaHelp to context-sensitive topics). Other benefits, points worth considering: * In a web-based location, the documentation will be much more visible, accessible, and easier to maintain. As already mentioned, the search functionality in the Javahelp is miserable. Currently we have a conglomerate of documentation files that have accumulated over numerous release cycles. Many of these are now stale, out-of-date, or slightly inconsistent with the IDE's current UI. And on the other hand, much of it is very useful information that many NB users haven't had a chance to look at because it isn't easily locatable. * In a web-based location, the documentation could serve to complement our tutorials (or vice-versa). We could begin interlinking between them. * We could add much-needed screenshots to the documentation. * Removing the JavaHelp from the standard distro would shrink the download size.
Many of the online help topics will be migrated to a web location. However the topics will not be wiki style, ie they will not be editable by users.
For 7.4 most of the online help was transferred to the web. This facilitates searching and users can now view the topics in the browser. The CSH/F1 topics will remain in the product and will be available in the javahelp viewer. These topic link to the related topics on the web. The idea of a wiki is a good one but the maintenance and resources available do not make this a viable solution for the help at this time. Marking this enhancement request as fixed