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#389 help system is not very convenient
One nice feature of gnuplot is having the documentation built into the program rather than provided as a separate document. However, its design based on a tree structure sometimes makes it very hard to find the desired information.
A simple solution could be to have a "help full" command that printed the entire documentation as a flat text file with suitable section headings. Then users could search and read that file with their text editors, browsers, etc.
Another solution would be to provide a full-text search, e.g. "help /[xy]tics/" could print
help set xtics: ... set xtics command. ...
help set mxtics: ... are controlled by set mxtics. ...
help set format: ... set ytics format "%.2f" ...
and so on
Ticket moved from /p/gnuplot/bugs/1395/
Moving this to "Feature Request".
Note that full PDF documentation is included with the distribution, and both PDF and HTML searchable documentation is available online.
So another possibility for improving the built-in documentation is to generate clickable links to the full online documentation set.
There is currently work to include an interactive help system into the qt and wxt terminals, like the windows terminal has had since forever.
https://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/patches/707/