startup message could mention apropos or `?"..."` for text search

[tpapp]

Recent discussions on Discourse suggest that not all users know about apropos (or equivalently, using ?"..." for text search). The startup message currently mentions

Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.

I suggest that text search is added to this, but I am still looking for a compact way of phrasing it.

[fredrikekre]

It could be added to the the help help:

help?> help

  Welcome to Julia 1.5.1. The full manual is available at

  https://docs.julialang.org

  as well as many great tutorials and learning resources:

  https://julialang.org/learning/

  For help on a specific function or macro, type ? followed by its name, e.g. ?cos, or ?@time, and press enter. Type ; to enter shell mode, ] to enter package mode

[KristofferC]

No one reads that though.

[tpapp]

What about adding to ?help, and also

Type ? for help, ?"..." for text search,
?help for more options, ]? for Pkg help.

Quotes removed as nesting them would be confusing.

[tpapp]

I don't think that a lot of Julia users would look at man pages, as typically Julia docs are not there.

[mcabbott]

Type ? for help, ?"..." for text search,
?help for more options, ]? for Pkg help.

Typing ? and typing ?help seem to produce identical results, mentioning both seems confusing.

The page they bring up has type ? followed by its name, e.g. ?cos, or ?@time which seems clearer than the rather cryptic ?"..." to me.

Edit --- In fact that's not hinting where to put the function name, it's hinting that with literal quotes this is a way of running apropos("reverse") without having to spell it. TIL. But that does seem pretty cryptic! That seems, IMO, a great thing to explain in a sentence or two of the page you get from typing ?.

help?> "reverse"
Base.reverseind
Base.reverse!
Base.reenable_sigint
Base.printstyled
Base.escape_string
Base.bitreverse
...

[ashwanirathee]

@mcabbott @tpapp @apparluk can I take this issue and work on it??

[tpapp]

I think that #37851 already fixes this, just needs to be merged.

[ashwanirathee]

Thanks @apparluk for directing me,well actually it was for hacktoberfest.....but why not be in good books of the people and work that interest me :) ?I think I'll check the #37646 and then move on to more specific packages that interest me like juliaimages and dsp

[baggepinnen]

The docstring for apropos could mention the shorthand help?> "string" version as well, I use apropos all the time but just learned about this shorthand <3