Ubuntu

GTK tooltips disappear too quickly

Asked by Andrew Zaborowski on 2021-01-12

Tooltips in GTK-based apps appear on mouse-over, then disappear in 0.5s to 1s, too short a time for me to read them. It happens in apps like gnome-terminal and firefox, but not in Chromium that has its own tooltip style and logic.

I'm running the GNOME desktop on Ubuntu 20.10. But this has been the case over many versions of Ubuntu over many upgrades. I haven't wiped out /etc, /var and so on since I installed this system from Ubuntu 13.04 or thereabouts. I'd like to find what setting, and where, can be causing this issue. GTK version is 3.24.23. WM is compiz I believe.

Question information

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Status:
Solved
For:
Ubuntu Edit question
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Solved by:
Andrew Zaborowski
Solved:
2021-01-14
Last query:
2021-01-14
Last reply:
2021-01-12
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : #1

If you sleuth around in the files and settings here
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1243772/customizing-tooltips-in-ubuntu-mate-20-04

You may find a timeout setting. I found this but it's for GTK 2.0 which isn't in Ubuntu 20.10
https://askubuntu.com/questions/14470/any-way-to-change-the-tooltip-duration

If you have ~/.gtkrc-3.0 or something similar you could add the same line as suggested here and test

Andrew Zaborowski (balrogg) said : #2

Thanks for the links. However the first link is about customizing the appearance of the tooltips. I just grepped the definition of the theme I'm using (in /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/) for "tooltip", "time" and "duration" but there's nothing about the duration. In fact I was told by GTK people that a tooltip doesn't have a duration, it shouldn't be disappearing at all.

The second link, well I may have to resort to something like this, it seems to be a hack that basically causes the fade-out effect of the tooltip to take so long that you're still able to read the contents.

And as for the .gtkrc-3.0 setting, that setting seems to have been deprecated in 3.10 but it was about the time *before* a tooltip is shown, not about its duration.

Andrew Zaborowski (balrogg) said : #3

unclutter turned out to be the culprit, I added my explanation to https://askubuntu.com/a/1307912/1171317 , marking this solved.