Re: [Q} Changing help key behavior
Re: [Q} Changing help key behavior
- Subject: Re: [Q} Changing help key behavior
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2010 16:07:38 -0400
On Nov 1, 2010, at 2:52 PM, Eric Gorr wrote:
> When I press the Help Key on the keyboard, my keyDown: method is not called and I would like it to be as I need to do something custom.
>
> Right right, when I press the help key, the cursor changes to a question mark.
>
> Anyone know how to override the default behavior of the help key?
If I remember correctly (and this is going back several years), the Help key on most Mac keyboards is sort of hard wired to produce the question-mark cursor, and it was originally intended to invoke routines in, I think, NSHelpManager that allowed you to present super-tooltips. They looked just like the yellow tooltips we all know and love today, but you could add images and lots of other things to them. Nobody every used them in Mac OS X applications that I know of, but I devoted a whole chapter of "Mac OS X Recipes for Mac OS X -- The Vermont Recipes (first edition 2003) to how to do it.
This facility is so little used that recent U.S. keyboards have renamed the Help key to something else. Oh yeah, there it is: "fn" on my latest extended keyboard, duplicating the function of the "fn" key on in the lower left corner of MacBook keyboards.
I don't recall that there was any way to override what the Help key does, but I could be wrong. Maybe I even explained how to do it in the first edition of my book.
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
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