Re: Tooltips on w32 slow and strange

["Jan D." <jan.h.d@swipnet.se>]

2005-02-14 kl. 13.26 skrev David Kastrup:

> Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Stephan Stahl wrote:
>>
>>> I reported this too a while ago but got no answer:
>>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-06/msg00060.html
>>>
>>> As far as i understand tooltips on w32 emacs does not use normal
>>> w32-tooltips but special emacs frames that are stripped of everything
>>> (modeline, toolbar, minibuffer,...).  Maybe this could be changed..
>>>
>>>
>> Emacs uses frames for its tooltips on all platforms. To change this on
>> Windows would make it more difficult to maintain, and would lose
>> functionality.
>
> Are you sure about that?  Under X11, tooltips come without any
> decoration and without any impact on the focus (I have
> focus-follows-mouse policy).  I never noticed _any_ problem with them.

The focus policy is maintained by the window manager, but Emacs tool 
tips are created with override redirect on, which basically means that 
the window manager ignores them, i.e. no decoration, and no focus is 
given to them.

But the X server gives focus to any window when the pointer is over it 
(the window manager changes this for normal windows), so if you manage 
to get the pointer over a tool tip, it will receive the focus.  This is 
hard to do though :-)

W32 doesn't have a window manager, I guess that is the source of the 
problem.

>
> If users of Emacs on Windows experience similar effects, this will
> significantly hamper acceptance and usability.  So I'd strongly to
> those working on the Windows port to see whether something can be done
> in that regard.  I can't see at all what functionality could possibly
> be lost.  At least the X11 tooltips on Emacs provide no functionality
> whatsoever except popping up some text in a single font AFAICS.  No
> face support, no clickable areas, nothing.  So if there is a function
> for popping them up in the system, I can't see what we could lose by
> using it.

The tool tip frames can have any parameter set on them that an ordinary 
frame can have, so there is indeed face support and you can have 
another font also.  See the tool tip section in customize.

What you will loose is perhaps international characters.  Unless of 
course care is taken to convert from Emacs representation to whatever 
w32 uses (UTF8?).


	Jan D.