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The only way to activate the help view on my Powerbook seems to be to go to the Help menu and select Dynamic Help. If I plug in an Apple keyboard and hit the Help key it will appear. To be consistant with other apps we should probably also honour Command-? - that's the one that shows up in Help menus. This may be an SWT issue, I'm not sure.
Help has nothing with the actual help trigger - SWT puts one layer of indirection by firing help events.
Kim, I think that UI should add a Command-? accelerator (key binding) for the Eclipse on the Mac. As far as I can tell, this is what the other applications are doing.
Yah, I couldn't tell if it was free behaviour or just a standard convention. Pulling back for us to consider. I'd really like to see this fixed for 3.1 - having to plug in an external keyboard to activate help kinda sucks. ;) Dejan, Nick.. any idea how we could integrate this into the workbench help support? Perhaps we could have a supplementary help command that would be hardwired into the help system?
If this is a standard convention on the Mac, then it Command+? should be handled by SWT. Passing by Doug to see if he agrees, and to see if there's a workaround we can do for 3.1.
One of the odd things about coding on the Mac platform is that there are many standard "conventions" that are *not* encoded in the native widgets. Much of the mac L&F comes from developers carefully following the standard guidelines. It's not clear, in this case, whether that means the solution belongs in SWT or UI. I don't think putting it in the UI would be totally unreasonable.
I think the lower down we can isolate platform differences in order to provide good consistency with platform-specific guidelines, the better. We try to keep the workbench code as platform-agnostic as possible, but there are clearly some cases where SWT does not have enough knowledge to meet platform expectations (e.g. button order in dialogs). This one does seem borderline. I guess the question is: should all SWT apps on the Mac support Command+? in addition to the Help key?
Apple says: "Pressing the Help key (Command-? or Command-Shift-/) invokes the application’s help in Help Viewer." How this is interpreted varies from application to application. With the help of Kim and McQ, we've found these examples. Safari, Mail, Pages: "Help" changes the cursor to a question mark (context-sensitive help), "Command+?" brings up help contents. Finder: "Help" does nothing, "Command+?" brings up help contents. Firefox, Eclipse: "Help" brings up the help contents, "Command+?" does nothing. Photoshop Elements: "Help" and "Command+?" both bring up help contents. In the face of these inconsistencies, I've sent an email to "Todd Brackett". I'm hoping he might put me in touch with someone who can give Apple's "official" view on these key bindings.
If you look at the Help menu for these applications, they all have a Command+? item.
From Todd Brackett: The Help menu found in many applications and the Command-? keyboard shortcut are both perfectly acceptable means to access the Apple Help System for a given application. You've already found the standard keyboard convention on Mac OS X to launch Help, but here is the documentation for reference within our Human Interface Guidelines: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html There is an online reference for accessing the Apple Help system from a Carbon application that may be of some assistance: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/ProvidingUserAssitAppleHelp/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000903 Help tags are short contextual help messages that appear onscreen when the user hovers the pointer over an element in an application’s user interface. They allow an application to identify the objects in its user interface. Help tags replace Balloon Help, available in Mac OS 9.2 and earlier. Help tags supplement user assistance provided by Apple Help help books: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/ProvidingHelpTags/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001325
I think "Command+?" should be bound to "Help > Help Contents". This means that the "org.eclipse.ui.help.helpContents" command should be bound to "Command+?" on (at least) MacOS X. I'm not sure what to do for other platforms. I know it is hard to tell which key to use as the help contents key on GTK+, but what about Windows XP? Dejan: The "Help" event on MacOS X should trigger context-sensitive help. Ideally, this would be the "help tags" that native MacOS X applications use. However, as we have our own help system, I'm not sure how feasible this might be. Do you have any thoughts here?
Douglas - I've been rereading this bug and our correspondance from last month and now realize that I didn't completely answer your question. Apple has been extremely consistent across its applications in both Panther (10.3) and Tiger (10.4) around the Command-? and our Help menus. I've tested Finder, Safari, Mail, iChat, Address Book, Pages, Keynote, and iTunes on both Tiger and Panther and have found that they all launch our Help Viewer application in a uniform manner. All can use either the Help Menu or the Command-? keyboard shortcut. These are the primary mechanisms for requesting help from the system on Mac OS X. We would encourage you to use both of these concepts within Eclipse. Details on the Help Menu can be found here: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html (Part III: The Aqua Interface > Menus > The Menu Bar and Its Menus > The Help Menu) Details on the keyboard shortcut for Help can be found here: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html (Part III: The Aqua Interface > Appendix A: Keyboard Shortcuts Quick Reference > Help) The use of the "Help" key, however, is not treated as uniformly on Panther or Tiger. As you point out, there are inconsistencies across applications. This may be due to the fact that Apple does not have "Help" keys on its laptops and, therefore, does not aggressively encourage its use. In fact, Apple's user interface guidelines state: "Pressing the Help key <may> invoke the application’s help in Help Viewer. The key combination Command-Shift-/ (sometimes shortened to Command-?) should always display the application’s help in Help Viewer." I may file a bug with Apple on this issue in order to push us to be more consistent. For details, see: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html (Part III: The Aqua Interface > User Input >The Keyboard > The Functions of Specific Keys > Help) While they are not necessarily relevant to this bug, there are two other Help concepts in Mac OS X: The Help button opens Help Viewer to a specific help page appropriate for the context of the button. Please don’t create a custom button; use the standard Help button, which contains the Mac OS X question mark graphic. Details can be found at http://developer.apple.com/documentation/ UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html (Part III: The Aqua Interface > Controls > Buttons > The Help Button). Finally, Help tags enable your application to identify its interface elements and provide basic help information without forcing the user to leave the primary interface. Help tags are short messages that appear when the user leaves the pointer hovering over an interface element for a few seconds. Details can be found at http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/ OSXHIGuidelines/index.html (Part II: The Macintosh Experience > Using Mac OS X Technologies > User Assistance). I provided this in my earlier post, but the most comprehensive document I've found on the various Help subsystems on Mac OS X is provided at http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/ Conceptual/ProvidingUserAssitAppleHelp/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000903 Please let me know if you need any additional information! I hope this is helpful...
*** Bug 113913 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Okay, I would like to bind "org.eclipse.ui.help.helpContents" to "Command+Shift+?" on MacOS X and "F1" on all other platforms. But, before I can do this, I need JDT/UI to move its key binding for "org.eclipse.jdt.ui.edit.text.java.add.block.comment" (Bug . I can't bind it to "Command+?" because of Bug 46588.
Urg, the bug with JDT/UI is Bug 113981.
Moving Dougs bugs
Is this still a problem in 3.3? PW
Yes.
I would like to be able to bind context sensitive help to a key, not just help contents. It's possible to bind Dynamic Help, but this does not provide the same experience for the Mac user as for Linux/Win. Dynamic Help requires an extra mouse click after being activated to select the item of interest, whereas context sensitive help doesn't. Currently there is no way to get context sensitive help on the Mac. This has been an ongoing problem with Mac notebooks, since they don't have a Help key. Another issue is that although the full Mac keyboard has a Help key, the new aluminum keyboard has replaced this key with 'fn' and there is no longer a Help key.
Hi, I'm doing 3.4 DBCS testing on Mac OSX with a new aluminum keyboard (JIS) and a Mac mini. As Greg mentioned in comment #18, new keyboards (US and JIS) have no "Help/Insert" key, which is replaced by "Fn" key. Adding another keyboard shortcut for showing context help would help users using newly available Mac desktops and Macbooks. Currently no default is assigned, while closing a UA tray can be performed by "Command-Fn-F4" or "Command-W".
Updated as per http://wiki.eclipse.org/Platform_UI/Bug_Triage PW
Created attachment 168521 [details] Help Search Digging old bugs and came across this. At present (at least from 10.5, which I'm current on), the Cmd+? or Cmd+Shift+/ opens the Help Search menu (or what ever it is called). This behaviour is seen in all native apps. Eclipse also honors this keybinding and opens the same item. Either its been fixed by another bug or just inherited the functionality. See attachment Either case, this bug is invalid now.
Marking as invalid ...
