First post - so a bit of background. Cut my teeth on Turbo pascal in the 1980's (V1 - when it first came out, loved Borland), wrote a fair amount of code, probably around 20k lines. Now using it again. I'm running lazarus 1.8.2 installed under linux (mint 19.0) and have written a few hundred lines of code - strictly console apps. Now starting to come to grips with GUI apps, and that's where my problem starts - my mindset is SSADM and am struggling with OOP.
So I need help, for starters, help within the ide. Installed the lazarus-doc-1.8 package via the software manager in mint.
- Help > help leads to an empty window where I find I can open a .chm file - searched and found /usr/share/doc/lazarus/1.82/lcl. Seems to provide a lot, but as example can't find Tmemo. Are there other .chm files. And how do you make it persistent so it opens this file automatically.
- Help > Online help : The help database "StartPage" was unable to find file "/usr/lib/lazarus/1.8.2//docs/index.html". So where is it? I suspect a problem with the //.
- Tools > options > help options and external - I have no idea what to do here?
- Did find http://wiki.freepascal.org/Installing_Help_in_the_IDE - not much help, written around windows not linux.
Did have a rummage around and found a README.txt in /usr/lib/lazarus/1.82/components/chmhelp - "This is a basic HOWTO for integrating lhelp into the Lazarus IDE". Tried following instructions but 'Components Menu choose "Open Package File"' - no, but have package > open package file. Opened "chmhelppkg.lpk". Now click "Install" - no install button, did file compile - ok, then use > install. Rebuild lazarus - yes, failed - cannot find lazcontroldsgn used by lazarus... If it worked I suspect it would have failed as not running as root and no permissions to write in /usr/lib????
So you can see I'm confused and would appreciate some help in getting help to work.
Secondary question - any good
reference books or other sources on lazarus? I have a couple of beginner/idiot's guides on lazarus, but what I need is reference info. As an example, Tstringlists - what are all the methods, etc. available to use with them, or the same with Tmemo, and so on. If I know a method exists I can google its usage, but if I don't know it exists...
Thanks in advance.