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

[David Robinow]

On 8/24/05, Luc Teirlinck <address@hidden> wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii wrote"
> 
>    It seems Microsoft removed the "What's This" string and/or tooltip
>    from the latest versions of Windows,
> 
> That was a smart decision.  They apparently forgot to update their
> website, which is what confused me, but I guess they will eventually
> get to that too.  So the only purpose of the "What's This?" string
> would be for KDE users.  But to KDE users the feature means a very
> different thing.  I do not have the very latest KDE version and hence
> do not know whether KDE still uses the "What's This" menu item, or
> whether they already followed Microsoft's example, as they should.
> 
> So what reason do we have to stick with an obsolete silly Microsoft
> idea, which, to their credit, they realized was silly and corrected?
 Hold on. I've seen no evidence that Microsoft has abandoned this feature.
I posted earlier that I was not familiar with it and it didn't appear
in my copy of Office 2003. However, it does appear in my Office 2002
at work. Both systems run Windows XP.
I installed my home version. It's quite possible I selected an
installation option that inhibited that menu item.  In any case
"What's This" , Shift F1, and the icon with the question mark and left
leaning arrow are application features not OS features. Some programs
implement it and others don't.  For example, Gimp for Windows
implements the feature, uses the Shift-F1 keyboard command, but the
menu calls it "Context Sensitive Help" (a much better name IMO) and
the icon is different. As mentioned before, Internet Explorer
implements it but not at the top level.  Qt Designer uses it. etc.,
etc.
  Some of the implementations are awful but some aren't.  Now that I
know it exists, I'll probably start using it.
 The intent of my original post was to provide a data point. "What's
this" was meaningless to me. I don't know if the "What's this" menu
item is helpful to new-to-emacs Windows users.  I've been using emacs
since before Windows was born, so my opinion may not be relevant.
 In any case, I certainly agree that the content of the help messages
is more important than the label on the menu.