Re: tooltip feature

[Arthur Miller]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
>> Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2020 11:42:04 +0200
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, jamtlu@gmail.com, Jean Louis <bugs@rcdrun.com>
>> 
>> Considering a tool-tip is just a small pop-up frame you could have it
>> with a character in a tooltip corner which could act as a "sticky
>> button" to press with mouse, and there could be a keyboard shortcut user
>> can press when a tooltip have a focus.
>
> Sounds complicated (and I'm not sure it will be possible when we use
> GTK tooltips, which is the default in the GTK builds).
>
> Emacs is already capable of redirecting the tooltip text to the echo
> area (to see that, disable tooltip-mode), so it should be easy to
> provide some command or variable, which, when activated, would copy
> the tooltip text to some specialized buffer, where it could be later
> read by the user.
>
> Would you like to propose a patch along these lines?
>
>> Such a "button" could be also added to context menus to make them
>> "sticky" and persistent on the screen.
>
> For menus, most Emacs configurations use the toolkit.  Do the toolkits
> we use offer capabilities to make the menus "sticky"?
>
>> Another version is to have a tiny separator say in tooltip
>> bottom/top that can be pressed with mouse to "tear of" the tooltip
>> and make it persistent on the screen.
>
> AFAIK, you generally cannot click on tooltips, because they disappear
> when you do so.
I understand.

I don't know what Gtk offers, I am sorry; I always avoided
to get into that toolkit, so I really don't know :-).

According to docs there is a GtkTearoffMenuItem:

https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkTearoffMenuItem.html

but then I don't know how useful is that to Emacs since I am not into
internals on the Gtk front ...

Sorry for the confusion.