Open Radar

 
19-Jun-2006 08:32 AM Jens Ayton:
Summary:
The default behaviour of the Help key in Cocoa applications seems not to be documented anywhere and fails to provide help, rendering the Help key entirely useless in most applications. The behaviour can’t easily be overridden.

Steps to Reproduce:
1) Open any Cocoa application, such as Safari.
2) Press the Help key.

Expected Results:
A reasonable default behaviour, consistent with traditional Mac behaviour, would be for the Help key to open the application’s help, i.e. have the same effect as pressing command-?. Technically, this would involve sending showHelp: to the first responder. Alternatively, but less helpfully, it could be treated like a function key, with a beep as default behaviour overrideable by responding to keydown events.

Actual Results:
The cursor turns into a question mark. It remains this way until the user clicks. Then the computer beeps. This is unhelpful and obtuse in itself, but especially so for a key marked “Help”.

Notes:
The Human Interface Guidelines say: “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.” It does not suggest using the help key to enter a modal state which does nothing.


[Bug reclassified as “Behaves correctly”]

07-Jul-2006 01:31 AM Jens Ayton:
I am aware that the Help key enters a context help mode which, in theory, might provide actual help in some application. (I am not aware of any Mac application where this is actually the case.) However, since this is not documented to the user, it does not provide any help, and may well be confusing if discovered accidentally; since it is not documented to developers, contextual help of this sort is not in fact implemented in applications; since it is not mentioned in the human interface guidelines, while several other forms of help (such as help tags) are, it cannot reasonably be said to be the correct behaviour. If it is truly the intended behaviour, it should be documented so users, developers and designers can become aware of the intention.

[Bug reclassified as “Duplicate /3776278”]