Re: Tooltips and menus

[David Kastrup]

Jason Rumney <address@hidden> writes:

> Chong Yidong wrote:
>> If that's too radical a concept for people to swallow, another idea is
>> to remove tooltips for menu entries that open up submenus.  Tthat's
>> what the Gnome menu does, and will probably solve the particular
>> problem that Richard noticed.
>
> I agree. Tooltips only appear when the mouse stays over a menu
> item. For normal menu items, this probably means the user is
> hesitating and could do with some help. But for submenus, the user
> might leave their mouse over the submenu entry while they scan
> through the items in the submenu. In that case the tooltip gets in
> the way.

For what it's worth, I can agree here as well.  Tooltips are detail
information, and the submenu itself provides better details than the
tooltip would.  Generally removing a submenu tooltip whenever a
submenu opens seems like a good idea.

> It might be useful to introduce a third setting for tooltip-mode
> that means "not-menus", to give the behaviour of some UIs where menu
> help appears in the status bar (equivalent to the minibuffer in
> Emacs), while elsewhere help is given in tooltips.

I think we should generally refrain from using tooltips on submenus,
but I don't think that the rest requires a different option.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum