Help & Docs Panel (in-app docs site)

What it is

A built-in help browser that loads the public Omniscio documentation site (https://docs.omniscio.com) inside an Electron <webview> without leaving the app. It's a full mini-browser — back / forward / home buttons, a title bar that mirrors the current section heading, and an Open in browser escape hatch — so you can read docs alongside your sessions instead of context-switching to Chrome. Originally external links in Omniscio kicked you to your default browser; the panel keeps reading flow inside Omniscio for everything documented on the help site.

The panel is also the destination of every "?" / Help affordance in the toolbar and is the surface that other Omniscio features deep-link to when they want to show feature-specific docs (e.g. an empty state's "Learn more" link).

Where to find it

How to use it

1. Open it. Three entry points, all equivalent:
   • Toolbar Help icon — the ? (HelpCircle) button in the toolbar's overflow row labeled Help & Docs.
   • Keyboard shortcut — Ctrl+Shift+/ (rebindable at Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts → "Open Help").
   • Programmatic — other features fire the open-help-panel window event to toggle it on.
2. Read. The webview loads the Omniscio docs site. Section headings show in the panel's title bar (extracted from the page's .section.active h1). The loading indicator is a thin accent bar across the top of the body while pages fetch.
3. Navigate. Standard browser nav inside the embedded page works as you'd expect — click any link, use the back ⟵ and forward ⟶ arrows in the panel header, or click the home icon to jump back to the docs landing page. The back/forward arrows are disabled when there's no history in that direction.
4. Open in your real browser. Click Browser in the header (link-out icon) to open the page you're viewing in your OS default browser — useful for sharing a docs URL, opening multiple help tabs, or using the browser's find-in-page if you need more than what the webview offers.
5. External links handled cleanly. If a link inside the docs site points to an external host (GitHub, external tools, etc.), Omniscio intercepts the new-window event and opens it via your OS default browser instead of spawning a separate webview window. The help panel itself stays on the docs site.
6. Close. Click the × in the panel header, or press Ctrl+Shift+/ again to toggle back to the dashboard.

How it behaves

How it works

Component. A single React component at src/renderer/src/features/help/HelpPanel.tsx wraps an Electron <webview> tag and a 44px (h-11) header bar with the back / forward / home / Browser / close buttons. The webview's src is HELP_SITE_URL plus an optional #<section> hash for deep-linking. HELP_SITE_URL is NOT a pinned literal — it is DOCS_SITE_BASE, the shared single source (src/shared/docs-site-base.ts, DEFAULT_DOCS_SITE_BASE = 'https://docs.omniscio.com', repointable per-seam via RENDERER_VITE_HELP_SITE_URL). Read the constant, never hard-code the host.

Lifecycle wiring. src/renderer/src/App.tsx lazy-loads the panel (React.lazy()) so the docs webview infrastructure isn't paid for until you actually open it. App.tsx tracks currentView === 'help' and toggles to/from 'dashboard' when the open-help-panel window event fires. The keyboard handler at src/renderer/src/hooks/useKeyboardShortcuts.ts dispatches that event for the openHelp action, defined at src/shared/keybindings.ts with default Ctrl+Shift+/.

Title sync. Whenever the embedded page finishes loading (did-stop-loading), Omniscio runs document.querySelector('.section.active h1')?.textContent || 'Help' inside the webview via executeJavaScript and writes the result into the panel's title bar. The docs site's CSS toggles the .section.active class on whichever anchored section is currently visible, so the title reflects what you're reading rather than the page's HTML <title>.

Deep-linking from other features. Features elsewhere in Omniscio fire open-help-panel with { ensureOpen: true, section }. If the panel is already mounted, its window.__helpPanelNavigate handle (registered while mounted, removed on unmount) navigates the webview to HELP_SITE_URL/#<section> — a hash URL the docs site handles via its guarded hashchange listener whether or not the site's JS has finished loading. If the panel is NOT mounted yet, the section is staged in help-panel-pending-section.ts (a one-shot read-and-clear handoff) and consumed at mount into the webview's initial #<section> URL, so the deep link never races the panel or the site load. Only section ids that actually exist on the docs site are deep-linked (see help-site-section-ids.ts); the site itself also ignores an unknown hash rather than blanking the page.

Webview enablement requirement. Embedding any <webview> tag requires webPreferences.webviewTag: true on the BrowserWindow, which in turn forces sandbox: false. This is a known and accepted security trade-off (also needed by RepoGuard, the email viewer, and other plugin UIs). It is recorded as accepted debt L10-F01 in g8-electron-sandbox-plugin-trust-postmortem.md, and the compensating control is documented in electron-fuses-contract.md — the main window cannot be sandboxed, so Electron fuses are the available defense-in-depth. Windows that do NOT host a webview stay fully sandboxed (the detached-session window, the OAuth popup); see ai-browser-contract.md popout-posture for the per-window rule.

External link routing. The new-window event listener calls openExternalUrl(url) from src/renderer/src/lib/platform.ts, which routes through the main process's shell.openExternal() after URL validation (http/https only). Inside-the-docs-site links navigate within the webview as normal.

No content cached locally. The panel always fetches from docs.omniscio.com — pages are NOT bundled into Omniscio's installer. This means the docs can ship incrementally (deploy docs/help-site/ with npm run docs:deploy, which syncs the library/roadmap/features/legal mirrors first and THEN runs the firebase deploy — never the raw firebase command on its own) without an Omniscio release. The trade-off is that the panel needs internet to load; offline users see Chromium's standard "no internet" page inside the webview.

Related

• keyboard-shortcuts.md — shortcut catalog including openHelp (Ctrl+Shift+/)
• INDEX.md — this LLM library is a separate doc surface from the help site; the LLM library targets agents, the help site targets humans