Unwanted help menu items

I've created a very simple one-window macOS app. All the help text for the app is contained in a single plain text file of less than 500 words. I've set up an action and a view controller to display that text when the Help-AppHelp menu item is clicked. But there's a search field that appears above that menu item. The search field serves no purpose whatsoever, but I can't get rid of it.


I tried deleting the default Help menu and substituting one of my own in the storyboard. But the search field appears again, unbidden. Is there a setting somewhere that will let me disable it?

Accepted Reply

What about "Help me" as a title ? Or " Help" with a leading space ? Does it show the same behavior ?


But found other solution here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22075413/remove-or-customize-search-from-help-menu


The trick of adding a space at beginning or end of help seems to work.

Replies

I have the same behavior, and cannot get rid of this search.


I have not tested, but I think this could be a solution:

- create a new menu in MenuBar

- set the action for the help (add the command-? shortcut)

- remove the older menu in MenuBar

I deleted the default "Help" menu and inserted one of my own. But it seems that giving a new menu item the title "Help" is all that's needed to have the search field added by default. I changed it to "Info" and the search field no longer appears.

What about "Help me" as a title ? Or " Help" with a leading space ? Does it show the same behavior ?


But found other solution here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22075413/remove-or-customize-search-from-help-menu


The trick of adding a space at beginning or end of help seems to work.

Putting a space at the end of the "Help" string did the trick. Thanks!

NSApp has mainMenu, windowsMenu, and helpMenu properties which define those menus for the application. The menus will not operate the same if they are not declared as such, so all you need to do is set the helpMenu property to a blank/empty menu. If you are programmatically creating your menus, just don’t set the helpMenu property for yours. Note that the search menu can be used to search any help book in the system.

I have finally open-sourced my drop-in replacement for Apple's help system. The URL is github.com/etresoft/ESHelp


It offers the following improvements over Apple's system:

  1. Dark mode support.
  2. Anchors work every time.
  3. This is an app window rather than a system window. When your app quits, the help window closes too.
  4. Searches in your app will only display help in your app. You won’t get results from potentially competing apps.
  5. The search field in the menu bar will work as you expect and display help results in the same window.
  6. Since the help bundle is a valid help bundle, your app’s help will be available via search from the system help tool.
  7. If you need to debug your appearance, everything works great in debug mode.
  8. The sidebar button is replaced with a home button to quickly jump back to the top level of help from an anchor, saving a trip to the menu.
  9. The share button is functional. Apple’s share services don't work with web archives, so the only thing I can share is the URL. It works, but there is no CSS so it isn't pretty. The share button is disabled by default.