wnck tooltips nitpicks

[Carlos Garnacho]

Hi!,

Lately wnck has been added some tooltips, I understand they try to be useful, however I see some problems there:

1) Report a one time information. Once the user gets to know the shortcuts the tooltip stops being useful.
2) Reports nonexistent/useless shortcuts. I've got 8 workspaces put horizontally, so going to the workspace above/below are simply non-applicable to me. I've tried to remove these shortcuts, but the information is still there, just with an empty shortcut label.
3) Is misspelled, "Goto" should clearly be "Go to"
4) The tooltip looks too large, and helped with the "tooltips covering the interesting widget" misfeature, it's feels less than useful here...

I'm using metacity, so I haven't any comments about the compiz specific messages. Hope you find my opinions interesting, feel free to wontfix if you don't agree.

[Luca Cavalli (luca-cavalli)]

I agree with Carlos here, mainly on points 1 and 4.

E.g. if you have a Firefox window on top with a long title the tooltip uses half the space available on the monitor.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. That's something we have been discussing this week, there is some bugs and one way to go could be to use the context menu to display the actions rather

[diegoe (diegoe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Dear ubuntu developers,

I honestly love your work, but since this new tooltips cover 1/4 (maybe 1/3) of my screen (1024x768) I honestly feel you screwed up this time.
I really like all of you, I'll buy you beer or any soft drink next time I'll see any of you*.

with lots of best wishes,

Diego

*conditions apply: must revert patches

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

I'm working on this among other things.

Comments to...

1.) With that reasoning we would have to make menu-accelerators "vanish" too, once the user learned to remember them.

2.) That's fixable and actually currently being fixed by me. Only automatically figuring out what the workspace/viewport layout looks like (thus hiding some of the "Go to workspace"-accelerators) is a messy task. I will see what I can do.

3.) You're right, but this is fixed in the code already, only not yet pushed into the public.

4.) The amount of space taken by the additional information exposed in the tooltips is a difficult balance-act.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The accelerators are a different, there is just too many menu items to know all of those and the most important, they don't go in the way

[Luca Cavalli (luca-cavalli)]

Sometimes the tooltip tooks even more than the screen width, leaving it half hidden. btw, I also think that a tooltip is the wrong place to put hints about UI features :)

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

In revision libwnck-2.21.91-0ubuntu3 (still waiting for upload) I fixed all issues, except for the width-problem. Sofar I've not found a clean way to ensure breaking the "topic"-label of the tooltip into multiple lines.

The initial CPU-load before the tooltip popping up is gone, exposing of accelerators now takes into account which window-manager (compiz or metacity) is running, what workspace-/viewport-layout is used and what plugins are currently active (checks for cube, rotate, wall, plane, expo and scale are added).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package libwnck - 2.21.91-0ubuntu3

---------------
libwnck (2.21.91-0ubuntu3) hardy; urgency=low

  * fixed bug (no LP-entry) in 02_expose_wm_keybindings.patch not checking for compiz-
    plugins scale and expo actually being loaded for the active effects-profile
  * fixed bug (LP: #192232), along those lines zoom or ezoom have their
    bindings not exposed as they are usually bound to modifier+button and that
    does not work with gtk_accelerator_parse()

 -- Mirco Mueller (MacSlow) <email address hidden> Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:03:46 +0100

[Luca Cavalli (luca-cavalli)]

Thanks Mirco, but please don't break long window titles on multiple lines, this will not solve the problem. Instead don't use window title at all, or at least define a gconf key to disable those new tooltips.