Re: Better default values for tooltip padding and `tooltip-hide-delay'?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Richard M. Stallman" <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 00:18:05 -0400
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
>     > If a substantial number of people find them annoying on the text
>     > in Ediff mode, we could do a number of things:
>     >
>     > 1. Eliminate the help-echo properties on parts of diff hunks in
>     > Ediff mode.
>     >
>     > 2. Set it up so that they only appear for the first 4 times
>     > that the mouse is above such text in any given Ediff mode buffer.
>     > (That way, they would be helpful, but once the user has seen
>     > them a few times, they will get out of the way.)
>     >
>     > #2 would require some C code, but it won't be very hard C code, so
>     > that is not a major reason not to do this.
> 
>     I would prefer the first solution, as I think that the meaning of the
>     font locking is quite obvious. I wouldn't want to see them the first 4
>     times each time I use ediff (if I understood you correctly) -- then I
>     would want to turn off tooltip-mode in ediff-mode only.
> 
> This leads me to ask two questions:
> 
> 1. What do others think?  Does (nearly) everyone agree it would be
> better to get rid of these tooltips?  If so, let's do it.
> 
> 2. What would you think if it were even less frequent?
> For instance, in each Emacs session it would show the tooltip
> only 4 times.

First, I'm surprised that the Ediff maintainer (CC'ed) was not brought
into this thread before discussing these options.  (Michael, you may
wish to read the original complaint at
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2005-10/msg00093.html,
to better understand the context.)

More to the point, I'm using Ediff heavily for a long time, but until
now didn't even know it popped tooltips, perhaps because I don't move
the mouse pointer when I read the diffs.  (How many people do move the
mouse in that mode, and why?)  Consequently, I cannot possibly agree
that these tooltips ``annoy'' me.

Even for people who do move the mouse as a matter of habit when
reading the diffs, I cannot easily see why the tooltips would annoy:
they pop on the text line that is different from the one where the
mouse pointer is, so if they obscure something, it's not the part of
the text that one reads at that moment (assuming the mouse pointer
closely follows the reader's eyes).

I also don't think that these tooltips are unnecessary; I think they
might convey important information for someone who is not as fluent as
I am with using visual diff tools such as Ediff.  So I think getting
rid of the tooltips (suggested solution #1 above) is not a very good
idea.

As for suggested solution #2, I dislike it even more, because I think
that a subtly inconsistent UI is much worse than a consistent, but
slightly annoying one.

Finally, I think we could prevent the Ediff tooltips from obscuring
buffer text being read, if Ediff would pop them farther from the mouse
pointer.  Would that be a good-enough solution?