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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

I remember Visual C++ 6 where F1 would instantly go to and offline reference to the current symbol, similar to Qt Creator now. It was great.

Of course now it searches done Windows live forum or something and is 100% useless.

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AFAIK pressing F1 in Visual Studio takes you to the top Bing result for the text under the cursor within MSDN. This could be the reference you were looking for, a reference for something completely different in a different programming language (a lot of potentially helpful context is not considered) or in extreme cases some other random article or discussion. It's all over the place.

Back in the days of Visual C++ 4.2, F1 would actually help.

Windows, Office, Visual C++ help are all God-awful now. As a few have said, much better just to Google search and lunge for Stack Overflow.

I haven't dared pressing F1 for a long time now but I remember Visual Studio versions where pressing F1 would completely stop your computer because it starts up the "Help Server", lots of 7200 spinning rust churn, more churn, an Electron-style app opens..

That would be VS 2010 and later. Before that, it had an actual working offline help system (which took, IIRC, more than half of those CDs that came in the box). And that help was actually pretty good.

I can't believe that I've used Qt Creator for three years and never knew that.

You can also add cppreference in as a help module: http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives#Qt_help_b...

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