Will Help Vault Eventually Return to App?

[mrfrostbyte]

Greetings, everyone! 👋 I just wanted to know, quite simply, if there are plans to ever return the (desktop) application's "Help Vault", that used to exist. Since slightly before v1.0.0 clicking the Help button in the app will only point you to the Website version.

This is all well and good, and I'm not complaining, but I do prefer local versions of product documentation in general. Call me old-school, but I miss the good old days of having a nice, thick hard-copy version of user manual for an application, or even the beautiful yet rarely-used (sadly) HTML Help (.CHM) versions.

Anyway, I'm not complaining, I repeat; I just want to know if there are even plans to return access to an updated, offline version of Help. The Internet is ubiquitous, but sometimes people don't have access, and some are old-school, like me. 😜

Peace and have a great day! 😁

[liamcain]

We moved the Help vault out of Obsidian to decrease the download size for users. In its place, we created the "Sandbox" vault which is still bundled in the app. You can access it via Open Help › Sandbox Vault. The Sandbox vault is a lot simpler than the hosted Help pages but includes the essentials.

While we don't have any immediate plans to bring the Help vault back into the app, maybe we'll make it easier to download an offline version.

[mrfrostbyte]

Thank you for the info, Liam! 🙂 I'll be glad if it is made easier to download the offline help vault, but this will help in the meantime. Don't get me wrong, btw. I don't hate the way things are, and it's cool that the download size has been made smaller. I'm just an old-school software engineer, a product of the '90s (and slightly less so the '80s), and I like a nice, neat line separating online and offline, so I prefer offline documentation wherever possible.

Personally, I've never liked the whole modern "everything is a Web app and let's just get rid of the desktop all together!" philosophy, just like I've never liked the bad habits other (mainly younger) developers have picked up like wasting data or processing power, simply because they're so spoiled they've never experienced what it is like to have a "slow" PC lol! I prefer offline documentation (I even the good old thick, hard-copy user manuals that came in software containers—yes, software used to come in physical boxes with floppy disks or CD-/DVD-ROMs 😉). I also prefer real application software over Web apps or mobile apps or Windows 10 "apps", unless its special cases like database server interfaces, etc.

The point is, I personally feel people have become much too obsessed with, and reliant upon, the Internet and being connected to it. It might sound strange coming from a life-long technophile and computer science student, but when you've tasted the world before and after the Internet's (and mobile technology) rise to ubiquity, it's apparent just how "spoiled" people have become in general, and as a "true" geek of the old-school school, I thrive on tedium and detest simplicity! 😜 But seriously, I still appreciate how flexible and powerful the Web and Internet are and many of the things that are made easier due to them. I'm just multifaceted and loathe extremism in any form, whether it be extremist Internet/online/connectivity junkie or the opposite. And I also love variety.

I'm sorry for the long-winded wall of text, by the way. I just didn't want people to think I was strange for liking to have an offline version of documentation available, and so I decided to share my reasons for it. I truly appreciate all the effort and time you guys have placed into making Obsidian MD the best Markdown editor/workstation of the world, and personally love it and its community, so thank you. And thank you once again for your kind and helpful answer. I apologize for taking this long to acknowledge it.

Yours most faithfully,
-frostbyte