Help, self-documentation, and Document Examiner on CADR and Genera

Evidence and release boundaries

System 46 ZWEI self-documentation

System and Terminal Help on CADR

System Help and Terminal Help belong to the window/keyboard system, not to ZWEI.

SYSTEM HELP walks TV:*SYSTEM-KEYS*, a mutable registry whose rows identify a character, a window or flavor, printable documentation, and how a new window may be created. The same registry drives actual program selection. System 46 preserves exact modifier identity and does not give Control a generic create meaning. System 303 instead records Control as force-create, strips it before lookup, and creates where the row permits. System Rubout cancels the prefix. The contemporary operator manual explicitly recommends System Help because sites and programs can add choices.

TERMINAL HELP walks the independent *ESCAPE-KEYS* table. Each row contains a character, handler, optional documentation, and execution options such as preserving typeahead or running in the keyboard process. Rows with no documentation are omitted; the display then appends the fixed special-function-key summary. This is a generated view of the table, not a hard-coded list pretending the registry cannot change.

The System 46 operator manual describes the ordinary Help key as a request for on-line documentation or programmed assistance and points readers to these two prefix-help systems. The architecture matches the manual: Help is a convention that individual programs and registries implement, not one global help process.

Lisp and flavor self-description on CADR

The Lisp layer provides a parallel path. System 46 FUNCTION-DOCUMENTATION checks symbol metadata, source lambda forms, and documentation retained in a compiled FEF's debugging information. Flavors carry documentation, instance-variable descriptions, component relationships, and method metadata. DESCRIBE, APROPOS, inspector operations, and DESCRIBE-FLAVOR turn these data into user-visible reports.

These paths overlap with editor Help but are not identical. ZWEI's PRINT-DOC reads the command-oriented DOCUMENTATION and DOCUMENTATION-FUNCTION properties. The general Lisp documentation accessor follows its own document types and compiled function records. A DEFCOM can therefore have useful editor Help even when a general DOCUMENTATION query returns NIL in a particular world.

System 303 changes and complete ZWEI Help choices

The maintained System 303 zwei/doc.lisp removes the System 46 B file-view option and makes the displayed choice list conditional. L appears only when the input stream supports playback; U is unconditional. The predicate filters the prompt, not acceptance, so a hidden L can still be typed. Its A operation is specifically current-mode apropos, whereas a separate implementation path can search the broader command set.

In the fresh runnable world the dispatcher displayed the complete available set:

Three source-visible edge cases are not apparent in the menu. The initial repeat choice is still B, so fresh Space finds no row and silently reprompts. The code has a ? Help branch after validation, but validation rejects ?, making that branch unreachable. Prompt predicates are evaluated forms and can have effects or fail.

The System 303 key documenter adds explicit mouse-scroll explanation and understands sparse as well as array command tables. The named-command search distinguishes a key-bound command, a command reachable through the local extended-command dispatcher, and a command available only through the broader “any extended command” path.

Runtime observation — System 303, fresh session d06-d07-20260718, generation 1, verified 2026-07-18: pressing Help and then Help displayed the current editor dispatcher choices. This reviewed screenshot is evidence for this world, not every CADR load band; full capture and publication provenance are in the CADR screenshot catalog. MIT and other applicable rightsholders retain interests in the screen expression; this minimum image is published under the page-specific fair-use review to support historical criticism, and no endorsement is implied.

Genera Zmacs self-documentation

Genera retains the same command-oriented design while changing the dispatcher. Its complete static option set is:

Genera still initializes the repeat slot to B although it has no B row, so fresh Space silently reprompts. Once ? or Help is entered, that dispatcher-help request becomes the repeat target and the following Space replays it. The L/U predicates filter the displayed prompt but do not prevent direct entry of a hidden option.

Genera Apropos searches both names and short documentation and then processes explicit synonym sets regardless of whether command matches occurred, so it can propose related search words such as insert/yank/paste and kill/delete/remove. Where Is reports that a command is not available in the current context rather than treating presence in a global alist as availability. The key documenter follows aliases and prefixes, enumerates menu members, and can accept a mouse input object.

T is more than a label. If the Teach Zmacs command is not installed, the code loads SYS:EXAMPLES;TEACH-ZMACS with ordinary load chatter suppressed, then invokes the Command Processor's Teach Zmacs command. The tutorial's text remains a licensed local asset described in the Genera help recovery article.

Runtime observation — Genera 8.5, session zmacs-research, generation 1, verified 2026-07-18: host F12 reached the Zmacs Help dispatcher after recorded host-key translation probes. The image establishes that harness mapping and the displayed choices, not the physical location of Help on a Symbolics keyboard. Full provenance is in the Genera screenshot catalog. Symbolics and other applicable rightsholders retain interests in the licensed screen; this minimum image is published under the page-specific fair-use review to support historical criticism, and no endorsement is implied.

Genera's reusable Help Program

The help-program framework lets a Dynamic Windows application map its own concepts onto Sage topics. It defines mappings for:

• an application overview topic;
• a command name in the program's inherited command table;
• a command-menu item at any menu level;
• the program title itself; and
• an Accept Variable Values option, using its prompt as a topic component.

The framework checks the live Sage topic index before offering a result and caches availability only until that index's fill pointer changes. Help-topic completion can mix overview records, program commands, and command-menu items. When a command or menu item maps to an available topic, the framework invokes Sage's Show Documentation command; otherwise it reports that the requested program concept is not documented.

Mouse-middle is assigned the :command-menu-help gesture. Thus a program menu item can use one gesture to invoke its command and another to request documentation about the item. The program's title is itself a program-name presentation that can be translated to Help about the program. This is semantic application Help: the object under the pointer and the active program determine the topic.

Source also contains a missing-help audit that would compare inherited commands and menu handlers with available topics, but the entire definition is block-commented in the inspected revision. It is evidence of an intended maintenance tool, not an installed command.

The Genera pop-up Help frame

The nonselectable help program inherits from Help Program and supplies the ephemeral frame used by Select Help, Function Help, Symbol-Help, and debugger Control-Help. SHOW-HELP finds or creates a matching frame in the caller's optional console/superior domain, changes its title and display function, selects it, and can wait for the user to return. Deexposure buries the frame, so it behaves like a temporary inspection surface rather than a permanent application activity.

Its fixed frame-specific leaves and commonly visible inherited controls are:

The complete effective table is larger: Standard Arguments supplies only modified minus/digits/Infinity; Input Editor Compatibility adds horizontal/typeout scrolling, display-position save/restore prefixes, search aliases, Cut/Copy/unmark, five no-op keys, and the full typed pointer tree. Exact aliases, numeric acceptance and errors, prefix leaves, fallthrough, and stale-frame cache tests are in the D07 specification.

Function Help enumerates the mutable function-key table. Select Help enumerates the live Select-key table and turns each activity name into a presentation, while explaining Control-modified creation and the cancel gesture. Symbol-Help describes special function and character keys. The displays are therefore regenerated from runtime registries where possible, not copied from one static keyboard chart.

Document Examiner

Source findings beyond the manuals

• System 46, System 303, and Genera editor Help all derive answers from the active command environment, but their dispatch choices are not identical. In particular, System 46's missing basic-file path becomes System 303's dynamic choice set, while Genera adds a load-on-demand tutorial.
• General Lisp DOCUMENTATION, Zwei command Help, flavor description, and Document Examiner are complementary registries. A NIL result in one does not prove that another has no documentation.
• Genera Help Program caches topic availability against the Sage topic-array fill pointer. A changed length invalidates positive and negative lookups; replacement or mutation at the same length can leave either result stale.
• The Help frame is intentionally ephemeral and reuses a matching program window by console/superior lookup while replacing its rendering function; source does not establish one global singleton or a separately accumulating activity history.
• Document Examiner chooses a different frame implementation at a 950-pixel screen boundary while preserving one Select key and activity identity.
• Document Examiner closes kept Sage file streams after approximately one idle minute when they remain open. The top level resets this timer around user input and closes each stream normally or, after an error, in abort mode. The selected DEX source establishes no separate exit-time stream-close guarantee.
• Candidate search has a source comment acknowledging a tokenization edge case for a one-character string that is both an opening and closing delimiter. The code falls back to the original string rather than silently returning no token.
• Bookmark display stably orders items with any nonempty seen-context history before never-seen items; that first pass is not a selected-viewer membership test.
• The hardcopy layer's default seen-only mode stops at the first bookmark not seen in the selected viewer; it is a contiguous-prefix cutoff, not an independent filter over later items. It also filters candidate printers through the Sage backend.
• The source contains a complete command/menu missing-documentation auditor, but it is block-commented. Documentation coverage was a recognized maintenance problem even though this particular audit command did not ship active here.

Fresh System 303 runtime observations

The same fresh d06-d07-20260718, generation 1 session used for the specialized editor study exercised all reachable CADR help layers. Its load band was System 303-0; the base and session disk SHA-256 at start was bb16e46ad81decfe1efe691d36b6aa4ce3fd4ffb82474365de3520989d397cb5, and the base remained unchanged. Public and private source identities, emulator and machine artifact hashes, display geometry, and clean stop are recorded in the directory/buffer-editor dossier.

The evidence-producing actions and results were:

1. In Zmacs, Help, then Help, displayed the dynamic dispatcher shown above.
2. D followed by the named command Dired displayed Dired's full editor-command description. This proved the named-command path without requiring a file-server login.
3. System Help displayed five live choices in this world: Top-L for Lisp(Edit), E for Editor, I for Inspector, L for Lisp, and P for Peek. It was a generated registry view, not the broader Programs menu.
4. In a Lisp Listener, (DOCUMENTATION 'CAR) returned NIL. A query for the ZWEI Dired command also returned NIL. These are direct evidence that the general accessor does not subsume all loaded command documentation.
5. (DESCRIBE-FLAVOR 'TV:WINDOW) produced a large live structural report including direct and inherited components, instance variables, properties, documentation, and method-table information. Flavor self-description was therefore functional even though the two general DOCUMENTATION probes returned no string.

The System Help capture 0023-system-help.png has PNG SHA-256 dfc229e0f3ab5cb233b56369abb0c473c78346572ff5febc102d98b565c1fb1f and pixel SHA-256 2a16fab7052e295e3d22c324a75ee813e42cbfbca074bd1334c99de89d6de448. The flavor report capture 0027-describe-flavor-window.png has PNG SHA-256 8e255c63863084b05e88f59d33262295c36d4f7ba588b9ac2e6d8848ff43cc88 and pixel SHA-256 41a87233090d34b7ddbaef0b556c70e0d4eaebbd40a4ea019435cb3d2740c7cd. Both remain local pending image-specific publication review; the reviewed ZWEI Help dispatcher above is the only fresh CADR image needed for the editor-help claim.

Fresh Genera runtime observations

A fresh isolated run named d06-d07-genera-20260718, generation 3, exercised Document Examiner from 05:36:27 through 05:38:54 EDT on 2026-07-18. The selected client was Genera on DIS-LOCAL-HOST, XID 4194310, at 1200 by 900 pixels. Select D therefore chose the source-predicted Standard Document Examiner rather than the small-screen variant.

Runtime observation: Select D opened this 1200-pixel Standard Document Examiner on 2026-07-18. The initial frame is published as the minimum visual evidence for the six-pane layout and menu; it shows only short installed-document titles rather than documentation prose. Symbolics retains interests in the licensed software. It is published under the page-specific fair-use review to support historical criticism of the layout, and inclusion implies no endorsement.

The initial frame visibly confirmed all six standard surfaces: title, empty Default Viewer, populated Current Candidates, empty Bookmarks, Commands interactor, and the two-column eight-item menu. Current Candidates began with installed documentation families and release-note sets. Pressing host F12, the harness mapping already established for Genera Help, inserted the computed Document Examiner Command Summary into the viewer and its bookmark pane. The displayed accelerator list matched the static core inventory above. Its named-command list included Hardcopy Documentation and Hardcopy Viewer, so the optional hardcopy command layer is installed in this exact world; source presence alone was not used to make that claim.

The controlled command sequence then entered Show Candidates, accepted the string buffer, and supplied no nondefault search controls. The source defaults were therefore heuristic matching and words in any order. The Current Candidates pane was replaced with a sorted mixture of topics and keyword hits, including flavor methods, buffer commands, and conceptual buffer sections, while the Help record remained in the viewer and bookmark context. This directly confirms that candidate search updates one pane without discarding the reading context.

Shutdown reproduced the already bounded public-VLM defect: the prompt appeared, yes was sent and accepted, cleanup progress began, and the confirmed stall then required SIGKILL. Thus forced_stop=true, state_may_be_incomplete=true, and the host shutdown was not orderly. The harness invoked neither Save World nor a process checkpoint; the private and base worlds remained byte-identical. Any unsaved Lisp state was discarded conditionally, not proved persisted.

The sparse initial frame above passed an image- and use-specific review and was copied byte-for-byte to the curated Genera asset tree. It is sufficient for the layout claim. The computed-summary capture has PNG/pixel SHA-256 e4d95337f28796ea53dadf16cd7b449c1d14edb1f0ab69fdfce62fd4e06e4957 / cbfde31cc403ffc21932163e81f3bf626de90e5c8dfbb2a7e03d157bac6e3a50; the controlled candidate result has 9fd940a4c91dd9e35caf3ad2213100c35d5a30c11d8693d0dd1f482b2722c827 / 2e038fa0f1b63c79b8c8f4c78d418652a3ebcf615cd172da61b0606dd7c8cd98. Those two richer displays remain ignored local evidence: their behavior is reported from direct observation, but publishing the additional Help/result text is not necessary to establish the present claims.

Preservation and rights

The public System 46 recovery may retain source-context extracts under its source license. The maintained LM-3 cross-check remains metadata-only where the tree's mixed rights signals are unresolved. Genera's SAB databases, standalone tutorials, decoded records, pictures, and licensed source remain ignored local inputs.

A runtime screenshot is a separate, image-specific publication decision. A sparse command summary or frame layout may be used as evidence after review; substantial manual pages or Help prose, decorative galleries, and bulk interaction sequences are not appropriate. The governing review is Publishing runtime screenshots for museum documentation. The exact CADR dispatcher, Genera dispatcher, and initial Document Examiner images passed page-specific review for this dossier and the linked D07 specification only; that review does not authorize redistribution of the underlying documentation corpus or any other capture.

Open questions

• Enumerate the live Genera Help Program subclasses and compare their installed topic mappings with the 7,809 static help-bearing source candidates.
• Determine whether the source-conditional Development Utilities Edit Definition and the higher-priority Concordia Edit Documentation overlay are installed in the exact Genera 8.5 world. The fresh computed summary confirms hardcopy names, but it is not an exhaustive effective-table dump.
• Audit compiled-only System 303 documentation records so NIL from a few probes is not mistaken for a census of the world.
• Recover or identify the intended System 46 Basic ZWEI file without substituting the 53-byte placeholder or material from a later release.

Sources

• MIT CADR System 46, nzwei/doc.31, 14,517 bytes, SHA-256 9e379b908a508565d3115216dc65abab4db279768b579df6a9e18db17eb63d06.
• MIT CADR System 46, nzwei/basic.zwei, the 53-byte placeholder reached by the B option, SHA-256 27ff8f344dc9bd48f4b3ee0178d9eb5df92626c3ef0969e36475203b3b63cc36.
• MIT CADR System 46, lmwin/basstr.163, 37,385 bytes, SHA-256 19e0771ff876d5325f18b97a2ccbf392f7d5950d3a89751d633d27d7cbe01e72, the selected loaded System and Terminal implementation.
• MIT CADR System 46, lmwind/operat.27, 85,337 bytes, SHA-256 a5ab658210dc09891b0886b58af705368e33a41f013073c8b9a637d99ab0f02d, especially System Help, the Help key, and Terminal Help.
• LM-3 System 303, zwei/doc.lisp, 23,055 bytes, SHA-256 533a733139c6de028462f15363edff5cdfcceebfb217a165b830f9838d8d9f6e.
• LM-3 System 303, window/basstr.lisp, 81,846 bytes, SHA-256 8ba3a16e726ed043e6585c7a68b7096bb2dcc5d6f05476afd89f84a48dff2645, for System and Terminal registry Help.
• LM-3 System 303, sys/qmisc.lisp, 83,123 bytes, SHA-256 d8c022999c40033b0073c0bec364fbe28ac20c4aa4ecb77afa4c70d1bfc9d840, for general Lisp documentation lookup.
• Symbolics, Genera User's Guide, “Using the Online Documentation System” and “Document Examiner”.
• Symbolics, Genera Workbook, Document Examiner overview, frame, commands, walk-through, and bookmarks.
• Licensed local Genera 8.5 sources: zwei/doc.lisp.~110~, 24,234 bytes, SHA-256 571f3fe9114376c9e13434e1825f4610198c227594cc3cb44eb35fc65edd0bcd; dynamic-windows/help-program.lisp.~4013~, 14,996 bytes, SHA-256 9863229903ce00a32262862d2cbc0ff22447ffafcae6169f2a418969b3e70c04; window/help-frame.lisp.~22~, 17,047 bytes, SHA-256 93f9421715235bb3d1fee377cdee353724b43aee3603a45aafe6c8a8f6397db6; sys/extended-help.lisp.~21~, 4,330 bytes, SHA-256 2123c65102bbcb0a8d00b3fe5427e39c4c72d7f90216f52f6b162cd22c963979; nsage/ddex/examiner.lisp.~81~, 31,580 bytes, SHA-256 dece335c917703acf440812d857af0e3e1d03dfe2b8118d21efcf6bfe4c22654; nsage/ddex/dexcom.lisp.~59~, 44,235 bytes, SHA-256 f07593f5ecf076ad9c6b8ce9f979747414a9cf975615bdae7774ce027db5948d; and optional hardcopy-dexcom.lisp.~1~, 7,965 bytes, SHA-256 5c5cb342877a5ac3e70480c9239f6ccefa530b06d7108f56c8ddbf549eb3a952.
• Fresh System 303 Xvfb session d06-d07-20260718, generation 1, observed 2026-07-18; reviewed Genera zmacs-research, generation 1, editor-Help observation; and fresh isolated Genera d06-d07-genera-20260718, generation 3, Document Examiner observation.

Last verified: 2026-07-19.