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

[Richard Shann <richard rshann plus com>]

On Thu, 2015-11-19 at 13:33 +0000, Richard Shann wrote:
> On Thu, 2015-11-19 at 12:01 +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> > Hi;
> >
> > On 19 November 2015 at 09:53, Richard Shann <richard rshann plus com> wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2015-11-18 at 23:41 +0100, Johan Vromans wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 18:49:52 +0000
> > > > Richard Shann <richard rshann plus com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I've pushed a fix that turns off tooltips on menus while leaving them on
> > > > > everything else (for GTK version >=3.10).
> > > > > Can you test if this makes a usable interface?
> > > >
> > > > It doesn't, and I fail to see why it should...
> > > > (I backported the fix to 2.0.0 but I do not think that matters.)
> > > >
> > > > Not setting a tooltip on the individual menus
> > >
> > > it is the menu *items* that have the tooltip disabled. I was imagining
> > > the problem came when moving the cursor down the menus, that is the
> > > browse mode. Experimenting yesterday I saw that if you don't have a
> > > tooltip on an widget then the enclosing widget's tooltip fires, so I can
> > > imagine there is no escape if tooltip timing is now ordained from above.
> > >
> > > I have just looked at gimp 2.8.2 and it has the tooltips popping up
> > > uncontrollably as you move down menus, the only saving grace is that
> > > there aren't quite so many menu items one after the other with tooltips
> > > as Denemo has.
> >
> > If this is happening on Gimp 2.8.2, it means that the issue has
> > nothing to do with GTK 3.x, since Gimp 2.8.2 is still very much using
> > GTK 2.x
>
> Actually, what I think it indicates is that the Gtk team have for a long
> time had a sense of good default values for tooltip timeout and tooltip
> browse timeout which don't suit the more complex programs such as gimp.
> (I'm guessing here that gimp is using the default values); indeed as I
> move down the menus in gimp unless they are broken up by non-tooltip
> items the tooltips once started are difficult to shake off. 
>
> I strongly suspect that is why I looked up the API and gave the user
> control in Denemo. All that has happened in Gtk 3.10 is that the user no
> longer gets control. Looking at other applications that my (old -
> Wheezy) Debian distro provides I see that most do not have tooltips,
> Evince in particular is at version 3.4.0 and has no tooltips and
> Evolution 3.4.4 has none either.

Well, Evolution has none on the menu items, it *does* have them on tool
buttons. I notice that the calculator gcalc has them on the buttons but
not on menu items as well, and again they are quite difficult to shake
off once it has got into browse mode. I suspect most people would find
that ideally they would want them to start after a longer delay as well;
but programs like this don't get much critical attention, people aren't
working with them for hours on end.

Richard