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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Does CHM mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help ?

Exactly. The original html based document format.

Which was not a bad format. Even as thorough Linux user with no Windows in sight, I have often used .chm files for handy, offline documentation. PHP docs come to mind, back when PHP was something I occasionally did.

Text, markup, arborescence, embedded medias, all in a single file, supported natively by the os and comparable between apps. Before the internet everywhere there is an entire generation of windows software, especially developer tools, where chm was the norm for high quality documentation.

Yeah i really appreciated the chm format too. They killed it or is it still alive?

Mac OS guides are also a very good editorial/digital work. (but no videos?). The guides on MacOS look very simple and clean. I appreciate when the software I buy has a guide like that (pixelmator) and not just a link to a website (sketch). I know the required effort so I value them a lot.

It still works just fine but the tools haven’t been updated for a while, almost no modern software supports exporting to it and it’s not “cool” anymore. So now we use often inferior stuff instead, or merely get a link to some online documentation, until someone “reinvents” it five years from now probably using some kind of electron variant making it cool again.

Hm, almost every desktop program i have on Windows that bothers with help uses CHM and pretty much every documentation generator can generate CHM files, why do you think it isn't used?

Everyone Googles for the problem or uses some monolithic tool.

Even notepad’s documentation has gotten worse over the years. In Windows 8.1, notepad doesn’t even mention the “.LOG” automatic date/time add feature.

Try to find node, go, vscode etc ... documentation in chm. They have third parties versions sure, but not official. And for those that still uses it, it’s rarely up to date.

Of those only VSCode is a desktop application and VSCode is already a web browser. Also considering it is meant to be modular, its documentation system would also need to be modular and i'm not sure if CHM is good with that.

For many modern languages, the language ecosystem often comes with a tool to generate docs that also work offline.

It had massive security problems, so they mostly killed it.

eg https://blog.checkpoint.com/2015/05/12/the-microsoft-help-fi...

FWIW Lazarus[1] has its own CHM generator and CHM viewer which uses its own HTML engine written on top of its LCL framework, making it cross platform. Though personally i prefer the native viewer on Windows as LHelp (Lazarus' viewer) feels a bit clunky.

(the generator actually comes from Free Pascal, but the viewer is only on Lazarus)

[1] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

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