Navigating links in *Help* buffer loses focus

[sooheon]

Whenever a Help buffer pops up, it has focus at first by default, to make it easy to escape with a single q keypress. However, if you navigate to a link and press enter, your point will move to another window, and the new Help window will not have focus. This breaks flow, because you can't keep navigating through links, and you can't easily close the window.

[sooheon]

I've found that (setq help-window-select 't) resolves this issue. @syl20bnr, what do you think about adding this to spacemacs config.el?

[syl20bnr]

Testing it... I' m not sure to understand the use case :-)

[syl20bnr]

I don't see any difference, can you provide a repro step ?

[sooheon]

On spacemacs develop branch with no personal layers settings:

1. q to dismiss spacemacs-buffer
2. C-h v emacs-lisp-mode-map to open a help buffer
3. o b to select a link, now point moves to scratch buffer. The desired behaviour is that point stays in help.

Eval (setq help-window-select t) and repeat above steps, you will see that traversing links keeps point in help buffer, so you can dismiss at any time with q, and go back and forth in history easily.

[syl20bnr]

Ok I understand now, this is nice, we can add it.
For the issue of the changing layout (when pression ob on a vertically split layout, the layout changes from 3 windows to 2 windows) I think we will be able to stabilize it with windows purpose package (planned to be configured for 0.105.0).

[mkcode]

👍 - This has slightly annoyed me for a while as well. Thanks @sooheon