Help panel

What it is

The Help panel (? from the menu) is den’s manual, inside den: a list of topics, one per feature, grouped under headings. ↑/↓ move through them and Enter opens one. Every topic is written the same way, so you know where to look whichever feature you open:

• What it is: what the feature is for, and when you need it.
• What you can do: its capabilities, each saying where to find it.
• Before you start: the tools, IAM permissions and access it needs.
• Configure: every den.yaml key it takes, then several examples showing the options in use. Left out when the feature has nothing to configure.
• Usage: step by step, for a common task such as creating a runbook. Only where it helps.
• Limitations: what it does not do.
• When it goes wrong: the common errors, what causes them and the fix. Only where there is something to say.
• See also: related topics, and the feature’s long reference in docs/.

Each section is drawn with its own Nerd Font icon and colour and a rule after it, and each group of the list has an icon and a colour too, so you see where you are at a glance. A topic’s title and one-line summary sit above its box.

Keys are not in the topics: h or ? in a panel lists what its keys do (see shortcuts).

/ searches the text of every topic at once. The list narrows to the topics that mention what you type, each with its number of matching lines, and Enter opens the selected one at its first match.

The topics are the markdown files in docs/help/, embedded in the binary, so the in-app help and the published one are the same text.

Configuration

None. The Help panel can be hidden or moved like any other with menu_order and disabled_panes (its name is help).

Prerequisites

Nothing beyond den itself.

Usage

Press ? in the menu, or select Help and press →:

  Help   28 topics

   GETTING STARTED
   ▸ Getting started          Find, write, check and reload den.yaml
     Command line             Every den command, and what it is for

   CONNECTING
     Environments             Where services are reached from, written once
     Transports               SSM, SSH, EC2 Instance Connect or kubectl
     Tunnels                  Your own SSH forwards and SOCKS proxies
     VPN                      FortiGate VPN with a browser login, no sudo
     AWS SSO sessions         Log in to AWS without leaving den
   ↓ 21 more

  ↑↓: move  enter: open  /: search  h: keys

In the list:

In a topic:

Esc undoes one step at a time: after searching for pgpass from the list and opening RDS, the first Esc clears the topic’s search, the second goes back to the list (still narrowed to pgpass), the third clears that, and the fourth returns to the menu.

Writing a topic

A topic is a file in docs/help/, listed under a group in docs/help/README.md as - [Title](file.md). It starts with # Title and a one-line summary of at most 50 characters, then the sections above, as ## headings in that order. A section or a group is drawn with the icon and colour internal/tui/screens/help/style.go gives it (templateSections, groupLooks); a new one needs an entry there. The tests hold every topic to it:

• internal/tui/screens/help/topics_test.go: the sections and their order, the summary’s length, no tables, links or images (glamour renders them badly in a terminal), each paragraph, bullet and numbered step on one source line (glamour keeps a source line break inside a bullet), and every See also entry an existing topic or docs/ path.
• internal/config/helpdoc_test.go: every ```yaml block decodes strictly into the config structs, and all of them merged form one config that validates. So names that must be unique (secrets, runbooks, sources) are unique across topics, and every env: a snippet names is defined in some topic. Every den.yaml section, service type, transport and secrets provider needs a snippet somewhere. A block that is not den.yaml (a shell command, a client’s own config) is fenced without yaml.
• internal/tui/components/markdownview_test.go: every topic renders within the box at 40, 52 and 120 columns. A long unbreakable word, such as an ARN in inline code, is what usually fails it.