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Run eclipse 0514 Help->Help Contents Now bring eclipse workbench window to front. Help->Help Contents It flashes in the Windows task bar at the bottom of the window, but does not come to front. It should come to the front. NOTE: If the help window is collapsed when you do this - it works!
It is not immidiately obvious, bug help browser runs in a separate process from Eclipse. It is the operating system that prevents application from stealing focus from another. It is possible to change this behaviour using Microsoft Tweak UI. This solution to run help browser as a separate process was chosen to solve modality problems in Eclipse 1.0, where help remained hidden when a modal dialog was open in Eclipse. SWT could not provide a way to open a window that would not be independent of modality of others. With current solution help correctly calls the SWT API that should cause window to come to front shell.forceActive();, but the final behavior is OS dependent. See bug 12073 and bug 13318 for related information. The OS seems to bring to front application window that is opening first time or is being restored from minimized. To exploit this fact to make help window always come to the front, would require always closing it or minimizing, which would result in much worse user experience.
The fact that the OS considers the help to be a separate process is a side- effect of the way we decided to implement it. The window *should* come to the front if eclipse is the application with a window at the front at that moment. I discussed with MCQ, and we should defer this until after the 2.0 release, but leave it open, because I verified that Dreamweaver for example is able to make this work correctly and they also use IE for their help.
We should investigate a solution that brings down the existing help viewer and opens it again.
When minimizing the window and restoring it again puts it on top of other windows without OS preventing it.
This trick does it: shell.setVisible(false); shell.setMinimized(true); shell.setVisible(true); shell.setMinimized(false); It does not show window being minimized, and only when it restores, so it looks like we are opening a new window and replacing the old one. No actual closing or opening help window occurs, which is good since closing openning a window would execute much longer and the visual effect would be worse. I have relesed this code into head. It should be included in the 2.0.1 release as well.
