tooltips

[MichaelBelousov]

would be awesome if there was a built-in/recommended way to display a floating tooltip when hovering over something. I think it's a very common UX pattern.

[david-vanderson]

Thanks for the issue! I agree and will think about how to do it.

[david-vanderson]

I think the best option here is "No-delay static position":

• tooltip is shown as soon as the mouse pointer is inside the target rectangle.
• tooltip is positioned relative to the target rectange (doesn't move with mouse).
• tooltip stays up as long as the mouse pointer is in the target rectangle.
• can move mouse into the tooltip and interact with widgets inside or even show nested tooltips (works similar to submenus).
• tooltip goes away when mouse pointer is no longer within target or tooltip or any child tooltip (similar to submenus but doesn't require a click to close)

I see this model in a lot of games so it has real-world experience. However it is different from the traditional "delay after no mouse movement relative to mouse position". Here are reasons I don't like the traditional:

• hard to know if a tooltip exists, especially with poor fine mouse control
• easy to accidentally nudge the mouse just after a tooltip appears, then hard to know how to get it back
• tooltip appears just next to mouse, almost certainly obscuring what you are trying to understand

That's my current thinking, but I don't have a use-case for this yet.

@MichaelBelousov Can you speak to whether this would work for you?