For the first time in many years, I opened the help window. Whatever I do, after I close it, it automatically re-opens itself. That is, if I switch to another application, hide ELAN, whenever I get back to ELAN, the help window is open again. Rather annoying, and never happened to me before. Can’t say it immediately started after installing 5.9, but like I say, it never occurred before.
(ELAN 5.9, latest Mac system version)
Hi Onno,
I can’t reproduce it on my Windows machine, I’ll try on macOS later, when I have my Mac at hand.
Is the problem gone after quitting and relaunching ELAN? (I would expect so, at least until opening the Help window again. Anyway, more later.)
Hi Han! Can’t reproduce it on my other mac either. Seems to go away with restarting ELAN, yes.
I tried to reproduce it on my macOS 10.15.5 as well, without ‘success’, so it seems to be an isolated, mysterious problem…
I’ll keep monitoring it, will let you know if I detect a pattern.
Hi Han, I think I have it. Something very simple. When it also happened on my other laptop, I noticed that it popped up whenever I hide ELAN. It turns out that command-H on mac does two things at the same time: it hides the application, and pops up the help window. So my finder (for instance) is brought forward, and in the background, the help window shows. I’m just surprised that this never happened to me before. I reckon the ELAN shortcut is not new, is it? It’s unfortunate that it overlaps with such a general system-wide mac shortcut. I just removed it in ELAN, problem gone. (I don’t look at the list of shortcuts very often, but noticed now that there’s no button in in the overview window to the edit function; that would be helpful for users I think, and an easy one to add. Now just viewing the shortcuts, people get the impression that they are cast in stone, unless they happen to know this item in another menu.)
Ah, is that it!
That shortcut is indeed not new, it might even date back to the time the first keyboard shortcuts were defined in ELAN. It might be older than the macOS Hide Application shortcut, but I don’t know. It can happen anytime that a system update “overrules” an application shortcut.
A button in the View shortcuts window to open the Edit shortcuts window would indeed be useful (although the manual and the help window of course mention the possibility to change the shortcuts 
).
Haha, yes, I know about the manual. But people also expect a certain logic in an interface.
What might have changed is that Catalina only partly overrules the application shortcut, but I haven’t experienced this before, that both the system shortcut and the application shortcut are activated!