After I received some feedback in the FlashDevelop forums, I made some changes and took some time to further optimize the search speed and quality of the results from my HelpPanel plugin.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the default search location points to the Actionscript Language Reference section of the complete help files. A majority of users of FD are probably advanced users that just need a refesher on a particular class or parameter, so this is the obvious default. I also added the Component Reference to the location list, since it contains a good deal of important classes, such as EventDispatcher.

Second, when you actually do a search, you’ll see nearly instant results. I benchmarked an average search of the ASLR to about 1.2 seconds on my machine. Previous versions of the plugin searched the complete help files, and could take over ten seconds. This option is still available, and should finish in half the previous time.

Finally, pressing the Enter key after typing in your search query will start the search, so you don’t have to use your mouse to click a button. I don’t know how I missed including that one. Get HelpPanel 1.2!