Re: Tooltips on w32 slow and strange

[Ralf Angeli <angeli@iwi.uni-sb.de>]

* Jan D. (2005-02-14) writes:

>> I just saw those tooltips the first time in my life by enabling
>> tooltip-mode and hovering with the mouse pointer over some menus
>> generated by AUCTeX.  If one is used to native GTK tooltips, the ones
>> generated by Emacs look really awkward.
>
> Care to elaborate?  The main difference is that GTK tool tips always 
> seems to appear below a tool bar button, where as Emacs tool tips are 
> some distance from the pointer.  The color and font also differs, but 
> that can be customized.  Maybe we can make tool tips appear under the 
> button if it is for a tool bar button.  Would that be better?
>
> The problem with the font is that Emacs doesn't support anti aliased 
> fonts (yet), but GTK uses them all over, even in tool tips.

The deficiencies you just mentioned pretty much sum up my concerns
with Emacs tooltips.  I don't care much about positioning, but the
difference in the font (font family, size, anti-aliasing) and color
used for tooltips alienates them from the rest of the environment.

Ideally there shouldn't be a need to customize the appearance of
tooltips.  It would be desirable if Emacs "simply" used tooltips
provided by the toolkit it was configured for (in case the toolkit
supports tooltips).  This would, for example, also eliminate the need
to re-customize their appearance in case one changes the theme of a
themeable toolkit.

But I guess there are more pressing things to do for the next
release.

-- 
Ralf