Re: [Denemo-devel] Tooltips - what am I doing wrong?

[Richard Shann <richard rshann plus com>]

On Wed, 2015-11-18 at 10:35 +0100, Johan Vromans wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 07:59:38 +0000
> Richard Shann <richard rshann plus com> wrote:
>
> > One of the time settings available in the preferences sets the browse
> > timeout, choosing a value for this (and, possibly, re-starting the
> > program) causes a call the gtk to set that value.
> > From what you say, none of these calls to set the timings were being
> > honored in Gtk 3.10?
>
> From what I can deduce from experimenting with several programs:
>
> a. There's an initial delay for a tooltip popup that is approx 1 second. I
>    haven't found a (system/global) setting that can change the delay time.
>
> b. If two sensitive areas are more or less adjacent, and one is showing the
>    tooltip popup, moving to the other area immedeately shows its popup. Only
>    when the mouse gets some time in between the areas, approx 0.5 seconds,
>    the popup delay timer is restarted. 
>
> This behaviour seems consistent between all Gtk-based applications I have
> tried, both Gtk 2 and Gtk 3 based.
>
> Apparently, before Gtk 3.10, it was possible to control the popup delay
> time, and, also apparently, that disabled (circumvents) the behaviour
> described at b. above.
>
> But this was changed in Gtk 3.10. Now all applications behave consistent
> according to a. and b. above. Since Denemo is heavily equipped with
> tooltips-sensitive areas, moving the mouse will almost always cause popping
> up tooltips all of the time.
>
> > Are you able to use a bug-fixed version of Gtk?
>
> Are you saying this has been ackowledged as a bug, and a bug fix exists?
> I have no problems building my own Gtk libraries, as long as an officially
> fixed version is in the works.

I've tracked this down, in the latest manual for gtk3:
https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkSettings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-tooltip-browse-timeout
GtkSettings:gtk-tooltip-browse-timeout has been deprecated since version 3.10 and should not be used in 
newly-written code.
This setting is ignored.

So, it is a "feature". It appears to be the case that even the regular
time before a tooltip appears can no longer be controlled, which many
people will find intolerable (I know of people who set very long times
on the tooltips, basically because it takes them long enough to read the
labels on menu items, so that having tooltips pop up while they are
looking for something is annoying - they would take a long time to read
a tooltip anyway).
I think we'll have to disable tooltips for GTK version 3.10 and above.
Fortunately the tooltip information is still available for commands,
it's just all the help for playback controls etc etc that will get lost.

But in the longer term we are coming up to a crunch - the people
developing Gtk are clearly only interested in a narrow group of users.
They decide that menus should not be torn off, and that is that, despite
the fact that Denemo users do tear off menus if they are going to be
using them for a while. They decide that GtkFrames should not have a
frame drawn, and so on.

Any suggestions as to where we might go?

Richard