Re: "What's This?" in Describe submenu

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Kim F. Storm)
> Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 09:58:45 +0200
> Cc: martin rudalics <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> 
> In its current form, it does IN NO WAY resemble what a Windoze user
> would expect from the "What's this" function.

I disagree.  I think it comes reasonably close, see below.  In any
case, your ``IN NO WAY resembles'' is, IMO, a gross exaggeration,
unless I'm missing something important.

> When you click on the "What's this" function in Windoze (typically not
> available as a menu item, but as a [?] icon), the cursor changes shape
> to an arrow with a question mark, and then the user can (in principle)
> click on anything in the application window to get help for that item
> (typically an input field).

Agreed.

> So it gives help for _visible_items_, not key bindings!

In other GUI applications, perhaps.  But in Emacs, most ``visible
items'' _are_ key bindings.  A click on a mode line is treated like a
(fictitious) key [mode-line down-mouse-1], a click on the "Customize"
tool-bar button is treated like [tool-bar customize], etc.  When you
click on something in Emacs after selecting "What's This?", we display
the description of what that click does, which IMHO is close to the
explanations popped up by Windows.

So, to me it sounds like we do something very similar to what you
described, with 2 notable exceptions: the change in mouse pointer
shape, and the fact that the help text is not displayed in a tooltip.
Am I missing something?