Online help content improvement

[witrak()]

Search syntax description in Help is explained extremely poorly. In fact, if someone isn't familiar with it the information provided in Help is not useful at all because there's no syntax of search pattern defined. Other minor flaws also are present (e.g. symbols "<" and ">" used as metacharacter and terminal symbol at the same time).
Many (if not all) those shortcomings could be much less troublesome if there were appropriate examples illustrating the usage of the most important syntactical constructs (perhaps with explanations of its semantics in more complicated cases).

Nobody demands full formal grammar here knowing how much work the developer has on his plate, but something like C language syntax description in the original Kernighan & Ritchie famous book would be welcome. While this probably can't be expected, adding a rich set of examples

[NotNull]

In what regard are the provided examples of the search syntax not enough for you?


For people that aren't familiar with the search syntax (yet), there is also Advanced Search (Menu: Search > Advanced Search).
That makes gettng used to the powerful options of Everything a lot easier, without knowledge of the actual syntax that is behind it.

[void]

Thank you for your feedback witrak,

The Help -> Search Syntax is for a quick refresher on the syntax.
For example: What is the operator for NOT again...
I don't want the user to have to scroll through pages of examples here.

I would like to keep Help -> Search Syntax short and basic.
However, I will consider adding examples at the bottom.
I will also consider another Help -> Search Examples menu item to list search examples.

I recommend starting here for basic guide to Everything.
Pressing F1 will also bring up help which links to this page.

There's some basic examples at the end of Searching in Everything.

[NotNull]

The Help -> Search Syntax is for a quick refresher on the syntax.

I think you missed the "Online" part in the topic title

[void]

I did... both the help -> search syntax and online help need improving.

I will be updating the online help for the Everything 1.5 release.