*, Actually
Help that rewards curiosity.
what this is
*, Actually is a new shape for a help system. Most documentation describes a thing a hundred ways and leaves you to sift. This does the opposite: it lets you choose your depth. Start at the surface — a name, a plain definition. When you want more, dial deeper: usage, then how it relates to everything around it, then the theory. Stop the moment the gap closes.
That gap is the whole idea. Curiosity, the research says, is what happens when you become aware of a space between what you know and what you want to know — an information gap (Loewenstein, 1994). A help system that shows you the gap, and lets you close it exactly as far as you care to, works with that instinct instead of drowning it.
where it came from
It started with SSH. I wanted to learn it — not the eight million ways other people explain it, but how to actually use and experience it. So I wrote it up in plain language, the way I'd want it told to me. Then I wanted more: the why underneath, the connections, the deep end. I wanted to reach for that depth on demand instead of drowning in it up front.
So I built a way to do exactly that. That was SSH, Actually — the first instance. The name tips its hat to the htmx community's running line — “htmx, actually”, the deadpan answer to every over-engineered stack: build the simple thing that respects how people actually work, and let it be enough.
go read one
make your own
A *, Actually isn't special — it's an instance. The
engine is domain-blind: hand it depth-layered markdown and a
site.yaml and it weaves. Anything with a shape — a glossary, a
manual, a body of hard-won knowledge you're tired of explaining the same way
twice — can become one. The
engine is open;
point it at your content and build.
Or don't. If there's a subject you wish existed like this, tell me what it is, why it itches, and send me your content — atmarcus@gmail.com — and I'll build you your own. Not a funnel. I just want more of these in the world.
about the stack
The point is craft, so the build is deliberately small and honest.
- Fully static. Plain HTML and CSS, one vanilla JavaScript file, no build step, no framework.
- Zero external requests. No CDNs, no webfonts, no analytics, no icons. htmx is vendored; nothing phones home.
- Authored depth, never generated. Every layer is real prose, written or extracted — the machine weaves, it doesn't invent.
- A domain-blind engine. One build system — the Loom — turns depth-layered markdown into a navigable graph. Each subject is an instance that supplies only its content; the engine never knows the subject. That's what lets one engine serve SSH, the Ho System, and whatever's next.
- Crawled from source. Instances can re-ingest their source of truth, idempotently, so the content stays current as the subject grows.
- Search that works offline. A static full-text index (Pagefind) ships with the site.