We have 2 sorts of Help in dialogs in KDE: 
- tooltips which appear when the mouse is over a field for example. They are short tips. They appear autpomatically when the mouse is over the element (when they are available which sadly is not often)
- WhatsThis help: using Shift + F1 or the ? is a more complete description of the element.

Have a look at System Settings, Appearance, Emoticons for example, all the buttons have both help.

Please review your wish considering this information!

Anne-Marie, I am confused as to how your comment is relevant.  I am talking about WhatsThis help, given that I opened my comment description saying that.

For clarification, my wish is that the popup help doesn't need a mouse click to activate it, but automatically shows itself immediately upon mouse-over ... and will switch to a different WhatsThis when the user mouses over another section of a program (without needing to click again, as we do now).

I hope that is clearer

It's not clearer to me and not knowing how OpenOffice does not help here.

I remarked that we have 2 sorts of immediate help in KDE and my question is: how your WhatThisHelp wish is different from the Tooltip help which appears on mouse hover. My comment is relevant in that regard: you said 'but automatically shows itself immediately upon mouse-over' which tooltips exactly do.

Maybe you mean that the Ctrl-F1 mode (the mouse cursor with ?) should show WhatsThis help without click. I don't know if it is possible to have a busy cursor and mouse hover without click. 

Shift-F1 and not Ctrl-F1 of course

That is what I mean.  If it is possible, I think it would make it much easier to quickly learn the basic functions of a program.  Cutting out the need to click over and over again would be wonderful.

Well first having good tooltips would make this unnecessary. We need more people to write them though!

"having good tooltips would make this unnecessary"

For some programs that may be true, but I am not sure that this is universally true.  Getting rid of WhatsThis is a whole different task and I am not sure that it is a good idea.  Tooltips have a different purpose than WhatsThis.

I did not say to get rid of QWhatsThis, I said the first goal is to have good tooltips. The better tooltips, the less need for QWhatsThis. 

I write tooltips and qwhatsthis often enough to be aware of their importance and also to know the difficulty of writing them.

got it.

I don't think that our conversation has been relevant to either confirming or closing this bug. I may not understand something. I don't want to take anymore of your time up with this, and since you have been the most active dev looking at this post, do you feel that it is relevant?  If it is, can you confirm it? If not, lets move on and close this report.

I think this can be closed as "WORKSFORME", because the system works as it should - IMHO. The tooltips often aren't very good, but are the "right thing" to automatically show on mouse-hover. Whats-This often has far more text and event formatting than a small tooltip and thus shouldn't be automatically rendered when you hover the mouse (re-painting larger areas of your windows won't make you happy ;). I think thats why Whats-This help requires a bit more interaction (i.e. clicking) than tooltips.

o.k. I'll close this bug.  At this point I think that the only way to know whether or not having whats-this show automatically after clicking "shift+F1" would be a nice improvement is by making a patch and testing it out.  If I have time I'll do it, otherwise we should all just move on. :)

thanks for sending your comments.

Vladislas, thank you for this reports and your explanations, I can use it to point to developers how including help is needed in dialogs!