Tooltips

Tooltips in GnuCash

In the 1.8-branch of gnucash, all menu items and all multichoice-option values were having a corresponding tooltip that was displayed when the mouse hovers of the items. In the gnome2 version SVN-HEAD, these are no longer there due to missing features in gtk2. This page collects the information about feasible re-implementations of that feature.

• https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2005-December/015139.html Discussion on gnucash-devel

Old implementation in 1.8

The 1.8-Widget for the multichoice-options was a GtkOptionMenu widget. It contains a GtkMenu where GtkMenuItems are inserted, which are created by gtk_menu_item_new_with_label. This was all used in gnc_build_option_menu() in src/gnome-utils/dialog-utils.c. The tooltip was directly set on any new GtkMenuItem by calling gtk_tooltips_set_tip() on the GtkMenuItem.

New GtkComboBox in gtk2

The old GtkOptionMenu is now deprecated since gtk2.4. Instead, the GtkComboBox has to be used. However, this widget either requires using a Model-View programming, or alternatively it will only allow to set entries by gtk_combo_box_append_text() which is what we currently do in src/gnome-utils/dialog-options.c. The function gtk_combo_box_append_text() will only allow to add one text entry per item, but it does not give access to the actual item widget, so it is impossible to set gtk_tooltips_set_tip() on the item widget.