Re: Fix some tooltip related problems

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 2:17 AM, Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org> wrote:

> It’s beyond me why you’d want to dim a tooltip. Dimming of menu items
> is standard behaviour on many platforms whereas dimming a tooltip is,
> afaik, a completely novel behaviour and as a result would just be
> confusing.

It might be worthwhile to look at how tooltips of other unavailable
things behave.

Case in point: A disabled button on a toolbar that shows icons only
(no text labels). The text label traditionally goes into the tooltip.
The tooltip is displayed always, no matter if the button is enabled or
disabled.

However, in that case we have a visual indication that the button is
disabled: its icon goes gray and dim. We don’t have that indication on
the modeline of the only window in an Emacs frame.

Also, this discussion assumes that we need to hide, or modify the
appearance of, the tooltip *because* the actions it describes are
unavailable. How could we change the behavior so that they would be
available even if the window is the only one in its frame?

Possible answer: Look at the splitter controls in some of Microsoft
products (Word, Visual Studio). (Or LibreOffice Calc.) The splitter is
there always, and always draggable, whether the window is split or
not. If the window is split, dragging the splitter resizes the panes.
If the window is not split, dragging the splitter splits it. If the
window is split and the user drags the splitter to either extreme end
of the range, the pane that got resized to zero is removed.