GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 130983
Add tooltip to presence icons in roster
Last modified: 2011-01-31 12:01:20 UTC
The tooltip would contain the complete presence in the form: Extended Away: Sleeping That can familiarize people with the icons and also makes it unnecessary to resize the roster window to read long presence statuses.
Not only to make it easy to know what the triangle or the yellow circle means, but also to be able to read the complete Status message when it is too wide for your gossip roster window. I find myself resizing gossip horizontally every now and then to see what the hell my friend has in his status. Adding the status message to the Contact Information dialog could be nice too.
This bug will be made much easier once this bug is fixed: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80980
Created attachment 37171 [details] [review] First simple attempt at this bug I spent a few hours looking into this. It seems a little more difficult than I expected it to be. There are from what I can see a number of ways forward: 1. We have a GtkEventBox in here somewhere and make the text cell renderer a container?? Not sure if this would work. Since an event box has a window, we can attach the GtkTooltip to that. 2. We draw it ourselves using functions like gtk_draw_box_flat (...) similarly to the way Gaim does it. 3. We use the GtkTreeView widget for the tooltip window and simply update the tip when over different rows. 4. We wait till Gtk supports it (see bug #80980). This patch fixes the bug using [3]. Not the best way but the simplest to get something going.
*** Bug 312176 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Marking my patch as obsolete because the new GTK tooltip API will fix all our problems :) we can wait till then.
We could use SexyTreeView (with a soft dependency on libsexy like in xchat-gnome) to implement this (very useful!) feature until GTK+ 2.12.
This has been suggested by Xavier Claessens (for flat groups), but the extra work and dependency are not work the hassle in my opinion, especially since we depend on GtkTreeView as a interface for GossipContactList. We have plenty of other stuff to work on in the mean time that is comming up in GTK+ 2.10 first :)
Gossip development has been stalled and it has been unmaintained for a few years now. You may use 'empathy' for similar functionality. Maintainers don't have future development plan so i am closing bugs as WONTFIX. Please feel free to reopen the bugs in future if anyone takes the responsibility for active development.