Welcome to the Online Help for the IDE

The IDE has online help to assist you in the process of building an application. The table of contents follows the logical process of building an application. If you want more information on a topic in the table of contents, select the topic. If you are looking for a specific answer to a question, try using either the Search tab or the Index tab.

Tutorial

If you are new to this environment, the tutorial, Creating the ColorSwitch Application, can help get you started as quickly as possible. The tutorial familiarizes you with the main features and concepts of the IDE by guiding you through the process of compiling, running, and debugging a simple JavaTM based application. The tutorial takes less than an hour to complete and requires no Java programming experience.

Context-sensitive Help

The online help is context-sensitive. You can press F1 in most parts of the IDE to receive information specific to the task you are performing.

Help Viewer Shortcuts

Most of the features of the help viewer are accessible from the keyboard. When you first open the viewer, keyboard focus is on the Back button. The traversal order goes from the toolbar to the selected tab to the left content pane and then to the right pane.

The following table lists the keystrokes most commonly used to navigate the viewer. For a complete list of shortcuts for the viewer, see JavaHelp Shortcuts.

Keys Action
Ctrl-Tab Shifts focus to the next component
Ctrl-Shift-Tab Shifts focus to the previous component
Up arrow Selects the previous item in the table of contents or the index
Down arrow Selects the next item in the table of contents or the index
Ctrl-T Shifts focus to the next link in a topic
Ctrl-Shift-T Shifts focus to the previous link in a topic
Ctrl-spacebar Follows a link in a topic

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