I just finished up the first release of a help plugin for FlashDevelop. I started things out by focusing entirely on searching for content. Once I’m sure search is stable, I’ll look into adding more functionality. The plugin automatically detects if the Flash help files are on the system. If they don’t exist, it will open a browser and search the LiveDocs. Of course, you can choose to search either location if you wish. Help file detection works for both Flash MX 2004 and Flash 8.

Behind the local help search is a nice little HTML searching class that uses weights to determine the top result. For every time a search word appears in the document, the weight increases. Words appearing inside certain tags, like <title> or headers, will receive larger weights. The algorithm runs pretty quickly on my system–usually only taking a few seconds to return the results, which is comparable to the help search in the main Flash IDE.

The included DLL is compiled against PluginCore from FlashDevelop 2.0 Beta 7, so it may not work correctly with a different version. The source is included if you want to recompile for a different version, or you’re looking to play around. You can download the plugin and source.