GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 115506
Workspace switcher tooltip is perpetual nuisance
Last modified: 2005-01-03 19:03:55 UTC
The tooltip on the workspace switcher, "Workspace Switcher", is a nuisance - always popping up and obscuring things. It's helpfulness decreases very rapidly as time goes by: the workspace switcher is the workspace switcher is the workspace switcher. Soon it's not at all useful like the tooltips on the window list are. Those usually have something new and useful to say as they present the full name of a window. The workspace switcher isn't really suitable for switching windows, so the name of the "mini-window" wouldn't be a useful tooltip. Workspace names don't often change and are probably the default for many people, so those wouldn't make useful tooltips either. Please, remove this tooltip. Or at least don't show it unless the workspace switcher has keyboard focus.
Tooltips for the workspace switcher seem to have been removed in GNOME 2.4RC1. Can someone confirm so we can close the bug ?
I don't remember the tooltips ever existing, let alone removing them; but I don't see them either with current cvs.
No tooltips in latest GNOME, so closing.
Havoc: The code for tooltips does exist and it worked before. It's not working in the latest code simply because there's bug in it atm. Btw, it's is a one line fix. :) but I could remove that part of the code if we decide not to have tooltips for the pager anymore. Do let know.
Maybe we should leave the tooltip as something you can only get with the keyboard? I guess we should reopen the bug until we either remove or enable the code.
PLEASE, don't remove the tooltips! I agree that the current tooltip is useless and annoying. But I have been longing for it to show the workspace name for ages. I think that would be very useful. In 2.2.0.1 I can finally name workspaces permanently and this is a very useful feature in organizing the desktops. However, the only way currently to see what workspace I am in, or to move to a particularly named workspace, is by ctrl-alt-arrow. And this can become boring when you have a number of workspaces. It would be really nice to quickly see the names of each workspace by hovering over the switcher with the mouse! Having the tooltip show the workspace name would also help to locate where a window moves/is moved, if you use the window menu "Move to Workspace x". Furthermore, the tooltip would still indicate to a newbie that the strip of rectangles is a collection of workspaces, since the they are initially named "Workspace x". It's useful to have names for windows and it's useful to have those names in the window list. Similarly, it's useful to have names for the workspaces and it's useful to show those in the workspace switcher. If you really insist not seeing "Workspace x" tooltips, and probably don't want an option to control this either, you could show the tooltip only if it's something else than the default name for that workspace. I don't like this kind of trickery, but I could live with it...
> The tooltip on the workspace switcher, "Workspace Switcher", is a > nuisance - always popping up and obscuring things. I tend to agree with Risto that if nothing else, the tooltip can serve a useful purpose to people who've never seen workspaces before. Would be interested to hear from Greg what the tooltip obscures, and why he's moving his mouse over the workspace switcher if he's looking at information in a different window (which I'm guessing he is if the tooltip is obscuring something else that he was looking at).
I agree that if we want tooltips, they should contain workspace names. This should be done at the libwnck level. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 125644 ***