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Tooltips are small special frames that display text information at the current mouse position. They activate when there is a pause in mouse movement over some significant piece of text in a window, or the mode line, or some other part of the Emacs frame such as a tool bar button or menu item.
You can toggle the use of tooltips with the command M-x
tooltip-mode. When Tooltip mode is disabled, the help text is
displayed in the echo area instead. To control the use of tooltips at
startup, customize the variable tooltip-mode
.
The following variables provide customization options for tooltip display:
tooltip-delay
tooltip-short-delay
tooltip-hide-delay
tooltip-x-offset
tooltip-y-offset
tooltip-frame-parameters
was customized to include,
respectively, the left
and top
parameters. The values
of the offsets should be chosen so that the tooltip doesn't cover the
mouse pointer's hot spot, or it might interfere with clicking the
mouse.
tooltip-frame-parameters
For additional customization options for displaying tooltips, use M-x customize-group <RET> tooltip <RET>.
If Emacs is built with GTK+ support, it displays tooltips via GTK+,
using the default appearance of GTK+ tooltips. To disable this,
change the variable x-gtk-use-system-tooltips
to nil
.
If you do this, or if Emacs is built without GTK+ support, most
attributes of the tooltip text are specified by the tooltip
face, and by X resources (see X Resources).
GUD tooltips are special tooltips that show the values of variables when debugging a program with GUD. See Debugger Operation.