#NortonGuide

A Norton Guide collection As I've mentioned a few times on this blog, I've long had a bit of a thing for writing tools for reading the content of Norton Guide files. I first used Norton Guides back in the early 1990s thanks to the release of Clipper 5, and later on in that decade I wrote my first couple of tools to turn guides into HTML (and also write a Windows-based reader, then rewrote it, wrote one for OS/2, wrote one for GNU/Linux, and so on). One tool (ng2html) got used by a few sites on the 'net to publish all sorts of guides, but it's not something I ever got into doing myself. Amusingly, from time to time, because I had a credit on those sites as the author of the conversion tool, I'd get random emails from people hoping I could help them with the topic of whatever guide they'd been reading. Sometimes I could help, often not. From what I've recently been told two of the biggest sites for this sort of thing (they might even have been the same site, or one a copy of the other, I didn't really dive into them too much and wasn't sure who was behind them anyway) have long since gone offline. This means that, as far as I can tell, a huge collection of knowledge from the DOS days is a lot harder to get to, if it hasn't disappeared altogether. This makes me kind of sad. So I had an idea: having recently polished up my replacement for ng2html, why not use that to build my own site that publishes the guides I have? So I set about it. There's one wrinkle to this though. While the other sites seemed to just publish every NG file they got their hands on, I'd prefer to try and do it like this: publish every guide I have in my collection that I have a licence or permission to publish; or as near as possible1 Given all of this, norton-guides.davep.dev has been born. The repository that drives it is on GitHub, and I have a wiki page that lists all the guides I have that I could possibly publish, showing what I know about the copyright/licence of each one and what the publishing state is. So with this, I'm putting out a call for help: if you remember the days of Norton Guide help files, if you have Norton Guide help files I don't have, and especially if you are the copyright-holder of any of these files and you can extend me the permission to open them up, or if you know the right people and can get me in touch with them, DROP ME A LINE! I'd also love to have others join me in this... quest. So if you want to contribute to the repository and help build it up I'd also love to hear from you. I will possibly be a little permissive when it comes to things that I believe contain public domain information to start with. ↩

3 months ago

I'm building an online #NortonGuide collection, in the hope of preserving all those handy help files we used to work with back in the #MSDOS days. Can you help?

blog.davep.org/2025/12/12/norton-guide-...

#help #hypertext #clipper #caclipper #xbase

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11 months ago

I've just released v1.0.0 of ng2web, a command line tool that converts a #NortonGuide file into a collection of static web pages. Useful if you want to revive information locked up in Norton Guide files.

blog.davep.org/2025/03/24/n...

#cli #python #MSDOS #Clipper

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11 months ago

I've just released v1.0.0 of ng2web, a command line tool that converts a #NortonGuide file into a collection of static web pages. Useful if you want to revive information locked up in Norton Guide files.

https://blog.davep.org/2025/03/24/ng2web.html

#cli #python #MSDOS #Clipper

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11 months ago

Now that work on my new #NortonGuide reader has settled down, and give that the underlying library has had some improvements, I think it's time to tidy up `ng2web`; another tool that uses that library.

#MSDOS #clipper #web #python

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11 months ago

Now that work on my new #NortonGuide reader has settled down, and give that the underlying library has had some improvements, I think it's time to tidy up `ng2web`; another tool that uses that library.

#MSDOS #clipper #web #python

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AgiNG v0.3.0 I've just released AgiNG v0.3.0. The main focus of this release was to get some searching added to the application. Similar to what I added to WEG back in the day, I wanted three types of searching: C...

11 months ago

I've released v0.3.0 of AgiNG, my #NortonGuide reader for the #terminal. The main addition in this release is searching.

See blog.davep.org/2025/03/22/a... for more details.

#MSDOS #Clipper #Python #Textual

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AgiNG v0.3.0 I've just released AgiNG v0.3.0. The main focus of this release was to get some searching added to the application. Similar to what I added to WEG back in the day, I wanted three types of searching: Current entry search. Current guide-wide search. All registered guides-wide search. The current entry search is done with a simple modal input, and for now the searching is always case-insensitive (I was going to add a switch for this but it sort of felt unnecessary and I liked how clean the input is). The search is started by pressing /, and if a hit is found n will take you through all subsequent matches. As always, if you're not sure of the keys, you'll find them in the help screen or via the command palette: Guide-wide and all-guide searching is done in the same dialog. To search guide-wide you enter what you want to find and untick "All Guides". With that, the search will stick to the current guide. As will be obvious, searching all guides that have been registered with AgiNG is as simple as ticking "All Guides". Then when you search it'll take a walk through every entry of every guide you've added to the guide directory in the application. Global searching is accessed with Ctrl+/ or via the command palette. With this added, I think that's most of the major functionality I wanted for AgiNG. I imagine there's a few more tweaks I'll think of (for example: I think adding regex search to the global search screen could be handy), but I don't think there's any more big features it needs. AgiNG can be installed with pip or (ideally) pipx from PyPi. It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing aging: $ brew tap davep/homebrew $ brew install aging The source is available on GitHub.

11 months ago

I've released v0.3.0 of AgiNG, my #NortonGuide reader for the #terminal. The main addition in this release is searching.

See https://blog.davep.org/2025/03/22/aging-0-3-0.html for more details.

#MSDOS #Clipper #Python #Textual

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11 months ago

Looking through some of the new #NortonGuide files I found, this might be new favourite entry in any guide ever.

#MSDOS

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11 months ago

Looking through some of the new #NortonGuide files I found, this might be new favourite entry in any guide ever.

#MSDOS

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11 months ago

In an effort to really shake down my #NortonGuide reader project, I've been looking around the net for any Norton Guide files I don't have in my collection.

Found another 11, including a rather nice #MSDOS programmers guide I'd long forgotten about.

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11 months ago

In an effort to really shake down my #NortonGuide reader project, I've been looking around the net for any Norton Guide files I don't have in my collection.

Found another 11, including a rather nice #MSDOS programmers guide I'd long forgotten about.

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11 months ago

The global search facility in my new #NortonGuide reader is coming along nicely. The main workings of it are done. Now the tinkering and tweaking of the look/feel begins...

#Terminal #Textual #MSDOS #Python #Clipper

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11 months ago

The global search facility in my new #NortonGuide reader is coming along nicely. The main workings of it are done. Now the tinkering and tweaking of the look/feel begins...

#Terminal #Textual #MSDOS #Python #Clipper

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Release The anti-corruption release · davep/ngdb.py NortonGuide.maybe now accepts str as well as Path. (#16) Handle parsing entries that contain an invalid ^a (generally what should have been a ^^a). (#21) Handle parsing entries that contain an inva...

11 months ago

I'm at the "add global search" stage of working on my new #NortonGuide reader; and it's thrown up some issues with corrupted or badly-written guides. So NGDB v0.10.0 is out and it's much more defensive. github.com/davep/ngdb.p...

#Python #Clipper #MSDOS

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Original post on fosstodon.org

11 months ago

I'm at the "add global search" stage of working on my new #NortonGuide reader; and it's thrown up some issues with corrupted or badly-written guides. So NGDB v0.10.0 is out and it's much more defensive. https://github.com/davep/ngdb.py/releases/tag/v0.10.0

I also write a tool to scan every […]

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1 year ago

Just released v0.2.0 of AgiNG, my #NortonGuide reader for the #terminal. This adds a wee bug fix and adds more guide directory management support. github.com/davep/aging

Also: if you set up textual-serve you can use this as a browser-based Norton Guide viewer.

#Python #Textual #MSDOS #Clipper

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1 year ago

Just released v0.2.0 of AgiNG, my #NortonGuide reader for the #terminal. This adds a wee bug fix and adds more guide directory managemetn support. https://github.com/davep/aging

Also, fun fact: if you set up textual-serve you can use this as a browser-based […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]

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AgiNG It seems I really do still have this need to create new terminal-based projects at the moment. There's been Braindrop, then Peplum, then after that came Hike. While I'm still tweaking and adding to th...

1 year ago

I've released v0.1.0 of AgiNG; my new #NortonGuide reader for the #Terminal.

#Python #MSDOS #Textual #Clipper

blog.davep.org/2025/03/12/a...

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AgiNG It seems I really do still have this need to create new terminal-based projects at the moment. There's been Braindrop, then Peplum, then after that came Hike. While I'm still tweaking and adding to them, and also using them to refine a wee library I'm building up that forms the core of my latest apps, I felt I still had this one app that I needed to finally build. Since the 1990s I've had this mild obsession with building tools for maintaining access to Norton Guide files. I've written readers for GNU/Linux (which also works on macOS too), OS/2, Windows, GNU Emacs, and also or the web (in multiple incarnations). Those builds have covered a few languages, including C, C++, Pascal, JavaScript and Emacs Lisp. I'd never written a Python library or application for it though. So when I first saw Textual mentioned in passing on Twitter a few years back, way back in the 0.1 days, I thought that could be the thing that would push me over the edge. In anticipation of that, back in 2021, I initially developed ngdb.py. This is a library that provides the core Norton Guide reading code for Python applications and could form the basis for other tools. As a test for this I then wrote ng2web (which works, but I think still needs a bit of tidying up -- something I'm aiming to do in the next few weeks). Meanwhile, the journey with Textual itself kicked off, happened, and came to an end; and yet somehow I'd never got round to building the thing I'd initially looked at Textual for: a terminal-based Norton Guide reader that looked nice and modern (by terminal standards). When I initially joined Textualize the owner had actually said they wanted me to build this as test of the framework, to essentially start out by employing me to create some Free Software that would help dogfood the library, but that seemed to get forgotten. Fast forward to the start of this month and I finally felt it was time to tackle this. The result is AgiNG1. As of v0.1.0 it has most of the features you'd expect from a usable Norton Guide reader, including: An ability to add guide files to an in-application directory. The ability open and navigate a guide. Full see-also support, etc. Full translation of characters as were under MS-DOS into the terminal. The ability to copy entry text or source to the clipboard. The ability to copy save entry text or source to a file. Access to a guide's credits. I still need to write some proper documentation for the application, but meanwhile all commands and key shortcuts can be discovered either via the help screen: or by pulling up the command palette: Hopefully the workings of the application will be fairly obvious to anyone who is familiar with Norton Guide files; if anything isn't making sense I'm more than happy to answer questions or take suggestions for improvements. One wee feature I want to call out, that I felt was important to add, was a "classic view" facility. The thing with Norton Guide files is they were mostly created in the very late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s. People would often get creative with the colouring within them, but in many cases the colouring assumed the default Norton Guide application. Its colours were white text on a blue background. So sometimes other colouring was done assuming that background. You can see an example of this here, with an entry in a guide being viewed using the default textual-dark theme: Notice the colouring in the syntax section. This is more obvious if the application is switched to one of the light themes: With a nod to this issue in mind, I added the "classic view" for entries (which is a sticky setting -- turn it on and it stays on until you turn it off): A little hard on the eyes, I think, but also filled with nostalgia! Talking of themes, all the usual application themes are available, here's a wee selection: AgiNG is licensed GPL-3.0 and available via GitHub and also via PyPi. If you have an environment that has pipx installed you should be able to get up and going with: $ pipx install aging It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing aging: $ brew tap davep/homebrew $ brew install aging Expect to see more updates in the near future; as with other recent projects this is very much something I'm going to be dabbling with and improving as time goes on. If you're wondering about the name, it's nothing more than a word that happens to have NG in it, and also a mild pun about this being an ageing hypertext help system; with the spelling acknowledging Peter Norton's nationality. ↩

1 year ago

I've released v0.1.0 of AgiNG; my new #NortonGuide reader for the #Terminal.

#Python #MSDOS #Textual #Clipper

https://blog.davep.org/2025/03/12/aging.html

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1 year ago

An issue with some #NortonGuide files is they use colour attributes that assume the original Norton Guide application colour scheme. Won't play well with my app's themes.

So I added a "classic view" mode...

#MSDOS #Clipper #Terminal #Python #Textual

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1 year ago

An issue with some #NortonGuide files is they use colour attributes that assume the original Norton Guide application colour scheme. Won't play well with my app's themes.

So I added a "classic view" mode...

#MSDOS #Clipper #Terminal #Python #Textual

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1 year ago

Next up for the #NortonGuide reader project is sorting out colour mapping. #Textual (well the #terminal I guess) has a very idea of what colour codes are vs good old #MSDOS.

Will need to create a mapping.

#Python

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1 year ago

Next up for the #NortonGuide reader project is sorting out colour mapping. #Textual (well the #terminal I guess) has a very idea of what colour codes are vs good old #MSDOS.

Will need to create a mapping.

#Python

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1 year ago

While my knowledge of the #NortonGuide file format is enough to make a working reader, to this day there's a few bits in the format that are unknowns to me. So I decided to ask ChatGPT about it to see if it had indexed anything I didn't know about.

Asked it to cite its sources...

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1 year ago

While my knowledge of the #NortonGuide file format is enough to make a working reader, to this day there's a few bits in the format that are unknowns to me. So I decided to ask ChatGPT about it to see if it had indexed anything I didn't know about.

Asked it to cite its sources...

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1 year ago

Woke up this morning thinking I didn't like how I'd done the see-also handling in the new #NortonGuide viewer. Dropped the pop-up menu and went with a more classic approach...

#Terminal #Python #Clipper #MSDOS #Textual

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1 year ago

Woke up this morning thinking I didn't like how I'd done the see-also handling in the new #NortonGuide viewer. Dropped the pop-up menu and went with a more classic approach...

#Terminal #Python #Clipper #MSDOS #Textual

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1 year ago

The #NortonGuide reader for the #terminal project now has a bunch more navigation, and see-also support too. It's almost done with basic functionality!

#Python #Textual

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