Ok, what's funny is that both of these points are things that people *wanted* in feedback from the first test release. I'm not sure if I'm able to spend another day tracking down too many details...but here we go.
Thirdly, the Help Browser behaves unusually in multiple ways: first of all, it starts off with the top item double-selected (both blue highlight and dotted border to the blue highlight), but despite the double duty, you still have to click to select that item again in order to get the next column to show up.
That's normal and was the previous behavior. Hit enter or click.
In macOS 0.47-1 64-bit, there’s nothing that gets selected automatically when opening the Help Browser. When I do click to select something, I don’t get the black dotted border on the blue highlight.
- The first item that appears when entering a new directory for the first
time is selected with a squared box, but it's not selected in blue, which
is confusing because selection actually does takes place (i.e., if the item
is not a directory, hitting the 'right' arrow will open it)
The black box is the keyboard focus highlight while the blue background is the listbox active item. From this feedback I connected them. I'm guess you prefer them not to be connected?
One issue is that on some versions of TK it seems as though that black box is not displayed, so if you use the keyboard, you have no way of knowing where you are, hence selection highlight follows keyboard.
If you use the keyboard arrow keys to navigate the Help Browser, and have navigated to at least the second column, if you use the left-arrow to navigate back one column, then use the up- or down-arrow keys to browse the items in the current column, the right-most column doesn’t update its contents, instead retaining the contents it had previously, creating a visual mismatch, as seen in the screenshot.
That's also normal / previous behavior. Click or hit the right button to update. If the browser updates whenever you navigate it goes a bit crazy visually.
This is also not previous behavior for me: in macOS 0.47-1 64-bit, whichever column is to the right of the current selection always reflects the contents of the current selection (mimicking the behavior of the macOS Finder, as one example).
It is previous behavior if you only click with the mouse and Pd 0.47 works the same (I just downloaded it to make sure). Pd 0.47 doesn't have the browser keyboard update and as soon as you start using the keyboard, yes things can perhaps be out of sync if you're expectation is as you've stated. Is this what you are referring to?
This is again related to showing where the keyboard focus is. I will see if there is a happy medium...