[Feature] Add more prominent links to documentation

[s-ilent]

What feature would you like to see?

Hi! This is a bit of an awkward one. For a long while I thought ImHex had no documentation, then earlier I stumbled on some through a Google search result.

As it turns out, the documentation is very hard to find. I couldn't find any links in the readme text to it. I searched the repository code for the docs URL, and it seems to only be listed in the About page of the Help menu.

I think it would be helpful to add some text explaining that there is documentation available at the documentation site, as currently it is not obvious.

How will this feature be useful to you and others?

Documentation is no good if it can't be found. For example, I've been opening hexpat files in a separate text editor and copy pasting them into ImHex whenever I wanted to use them. Having instructions on how the parts of ImHex function is just really useful.

I've recommended ImHex to a few other people. To see if this would be useful for more people than just me, I asked them if they'd "found the documentation", they all responded "what documentation?".

Request Type

• [X] I can provide a PoC for this feature or am willing to work on it myself and submit a PR

Additional context?

No response

[WerWolv]

Hey! You're right of course, however there are links available in quite a few places. First there's a link almost at the top of the Readme:

Then there's two links on the welcome screen, the page that's first displayed when opening ImHex:

Lastly there's a link in the Help Menu as well as a search bar to directly "Ask" the documentation certain questions:

The interactive tutorial and also the Achievements both point you towards that option as well. Is there any place where you'd have expected links to the Documentation instead? I'm happy to make it more obvious if it's hard to find but it's definitely mentioned in a few locations.

[paxcut]

also here

[s-ilent]

Yeah. I think having links in the application is good, but it's easy to overlook them. Banner blindness is a common thing even among programmers.

For instance, the badge in the readme is grouped together with various statistics. Other elements of that group like plugins, code statistics, and downloads, are available from elsewhere on the page. Plus, the badge is an image, so it isn't searchable or translatable.

Once loaded into the application, ImHex is easy to use and laid out in a familiar way. ...Which means it's possible to jump into the application and immediately begin using it without committing the contents of the splash screen to memory.

Personally I find a lot of useful tools have a menu structure like "Help > About"... so I never think to check the Help menu for documentation.

When I look for documentation on a tool, I typically open the readme and scroll through it. I think this it's good to use this convention. Even for bigger projects, if the instructions aren't part of the readme itself, they're normally just linked to. i.e. Godot;

Documentation and demos - The official documentation is hosted on Read the Docs. It is maintained by the Godot community in its own GitHub repository.

So I think it would be good to add a section to the readme that just links to the documentation, similar to how the info on contributors, patterns, and plugins is presented. Of course, the problem is me not seeing the obvious signs and sticking to a behavioral pattern, but I think that's just a problem with being human.