Wish: Symbol and footprint editors : Tooltips for long texts

[Laurent Haas]

When using the symbol and the footprint editors, most of the text located in the left list are truncated. To read them, we have to enlarge the list (but the drawing area becomes shrunk), or select it (but when you're looking for something, it's a tedious work to select them, one by one).

Ideally, when the mouse is hovering a text larger than the current column width, after a while, it should open a tooltip with the complete text inside it.

Application: kicad
Version: (5.1.2)-1, release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.61.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1 (WinSSL) zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.6 libidn2/2.0.5 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.0.5) nghttp2/1.34.0
Platform: Windows 7 (build 7601, Service Pack 1), 32 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
    Boost: 1.68.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.61.1
    Compiler: GCC 7.3.0 with C++ ABI 1011

Build settings:
    USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
    USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[eelik (eelik)]

There are certainly even more places in KiCad where this could help.

Some application implement this in a nice way so that if the text is a one-liner the tooltip is located exactly on top of the original text so that when you hover over it, it looks like the text is just expanded to be wholly visible in a tooltip-like box. And there's no need for a delay before showing it.

[Laurent Haas (efcis)]

@eelik That would be even better. Thanks for this suggestion.

[Michael Kavanagh (michaelkavanagh)]

Can you not scroll the list horizontally to read the "truncated" description text?

[Laurent Haas (efcis)]

Sure, but it's kind of tedious. Having the full text displayed is much easier to deal with. BTW, another suggestion would be multi-line cells with auto-wrap for descriptions.

[Laurent Haas (efcis)]

By chance, I found that CvPcb has the feature eelik mentioned in comment #1. Maybe it could be applied to these lists as well ?

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

This is automatic on OSX. Do you not get tooltips on the other platforms if you hover over the tree items?

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

I thought we auto-resized the columns now?

[Laurent Haas (efcis)]

@Jeff and @Seth : What version are you talking about ? I just checked on the latest stable 5.1.4 and the original issue remains. I'll check 5.1 branch and master later on.

[Ian McInerney (imcinerney)]

On the current master branch, the columns are autosized to fit the text.

Application: ModEdit
Version: (5.1.0-1574-g22fdc7f51-dirty), debug build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.65.3 OpenSSL/1.1.1c-fips zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.0.5) libssh/0.9.0/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.38.0
Platform: Linux 5.1.18-300.fc30.x86_64 x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
    Boost: 1.69.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.65.3
    Compiler: Clang 8.0.0 with C++ ABI 1002

Build settings:
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON
    KICAD_STDLIB_DEBUG=OFF
    KICAD_STDLIB_LIGHT_DEBUG=OFF
    KICAD_SANITIZE=OFF

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for KiCad because there has been no activity for 60 days.]