June 3, 2008
Banish the always-on-top Help Viewer with ease
Posted Jun. 3, ’08, 8:56 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips
Back on Valentine’s Day we covered one way to tweak Leopard’s new floating Help Viewer and make it behave like it used to in the good old days of Tiger and before. The way it just floats over everything is plumb unnatural if you ask me.
Unfortunately, the tip from February was a bit complicated, so we were pretty psyched to see a much simpler solution make its way onto Mac OS X Hints this morning. It appears that you can simply issue this one line command into Terminal to return the Help Viewer’s window behavior to normal.
defaults write com.apple.helpviewer NormalWindow -bool true
There you go; that’s it. I gave this a try and it worked like a charm—suck it, Help Window! If you’re looking for a way to access the Help Viewer via command-tab and the Dock, hit the above link for the extra instructions.
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Just a heads up, Exposé can't handle this window (not without the command-tab and Dock part anyway). I opened help on Safari, the window opened behind the frontmost Safari window. When I used Exposé to select the help window, all the Safari windows ended up on top of it--not what I had in mind.