Community
Participate
Working Groups
We should add a 'Dynamic Help' menu item on the 'Help' menu to open the new Help view. Right now, the view opens when F1 is pressed. This should continue but F1 should be accelerator for 'Dynamic Help' menu item, not the command that can only be accessed via F1.
Patch forthcoming.
F1 is handled specially by SWT. Doug, can you recommend the best way to get an action showing F1 as its accelerator, without blocking SWT's help callback?
First of all, the help key is a platform-dependent key. On GTK+, for example, it is "Ctrl+F1" not "F1". On some systems it might be a key labelled "Help" (SWT.HELP). I am not aware of anyway of figuring out this key by using SWT. You might be able to do it by writing your own native code. You must also be able to handle the case where the user changes this key using the tools provided by the desktop. In general, we have no ability to override this key, so defining a command for it would be wrong. We simply want to display the native binding, if we can figure it out. The only good way I can think of is to define a custom contribution item and have it call MenuItem.setText(String).
There are two requests here I would like to cover: 1) Provide a first-class alternative to the help key (F1 on Windows, Shift-F1 on Linux, 'Help' key on Mac etc) 2) Show the help key in the menu item Although 2) would be nice, 1) is my main focus because a surpising number of users does not know that F1 will open context/dynamic help. Apparently it was a common knowledge in the past but not any more. Therefore, we need a proper menu item to activate the equivalent command.
Do you want the context-sensitive help ("what's this?", as it's called on KDE) or the help contents? Either way, I think you run into the same problem. Perhaps we should get SWT comment on the feasibility of providing the help accelerator key. I talked with Billy Biggs on IRC, but he doesn't know of any way of determining the key.
In 3.1 F1 key has been mapped to opening the help view into the 'Related Topics' page. Therefore it is an advanced version of 'What's this' in a sense that it provides topics related to what is currently active in the window. In addition, help is dynamic in that it updates as you click around (in some cases like Java editor, it even shows dynamic help for Java elements as you click around in the editor). As I said, I will attach a patch for the 'Dynamic Help' menu item. We can then treat displaying the help key as a 'nice to have'.
I assume this needs to be done for M6, as it probably requires API on ActionFactory.
Created attachment 18946 [details] Eclipse UI patch
Created attachment 18947 [details] Workbench patch
Created attachment 18948 [details] Workbench IDE patch
Nick, attached are patches that implement the addition. As I did this, I noticed that help view looks rather unrooly now i.e. it begs for separators to logically group items. We should probably toss in a couple to have some order.
Thanks, I can't get to this today, but will check it out early next week.
(In reply to comment #11) > Nick, attached are patches that implement the addition. > As I did this, I noticed that help view looks rather unrooly now i.e. it begs > for separators to logically group items. We should probably toss in a couple > to have some order. I my comment above, I really meant 'help menu', not 'help view' :-).
Dejan, did you want F1 as an accelerator for this menu item. This seems to be the case for other apps.
oops.. I did not mean to suggest I knew more than comment #3 ignore my last comment
marking as fixed, dejan please try this out in the latest builds or from HEAD
Verified in I20050330-0500, windows XP dual-monitor
