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Pressing F1 on a menu item I get "Using the IDE Help System". Reading it carefully it looks like an intention. There is a section that discuss context help for dialogs only. Is not this restriction a usability bug? My (naive) expectation is that after pressing F1 on a menu item a help for the selected action is displayed.... ....and really there was an attempt to open it: Warning: the JavaHelp topic ID org.netbeans.modules.diff.PatchAction was not found. Warning: the JavaHelp topic ID org.netbeans.modules.favorites.Actions$View was not found. I have not found any menu item with live ID, yet... too bad.
Actually, this should probably be broken into three issues: *ENHANCEMENT - provide context sensitive help for menu items. We do not do it now, because it is a marginal use case that someone would press F1 on a menu item, and we want to make context sensitive help specific to the context (e.g. about what happens when you select the menu item, not just a description of the action itself). So far, we have judged that it is not worth the effort. *There are some help IDs in the code that do not have topics assigned to them. I am going to use this topic to track that part of the issue. Dropping to P3 as the use case is fairly marginal.
Is there an option to run that spits out all of the help ids set in the entire build? More importantly, can't we just modify the code so that if there is an unmapped help ID it shows the Using the IDE Help System page?
dropping this to P4. It's nominally a bug, but I don't see enough people asking about F1 on menu items to warrant tracking as closely as a P3. Some notes: *most menu items use the same ID: org.netbeans.core.windows.view.ui.MainWindow. This ID is mapped to a generic topic *I have made a pass and identified items that don't use that ID and don't have the ID mapped. I'm creating mappings for those now so that the "Finding INfo in the IDE" topic is displayed for those as well
From reading through the thread, the resolution was agreed to display a generic page "Finding information about the IDE". All help IDs that are not mapped to a specific topic are hooked now to this generic page, which tells that no topic is mapped to this feature. Closing the issue as resolved.