Bug 494463 - Suppress tooltip when its text would be identical to the visible text
Summary: Suppress tooltip when its text would be identical to the visible text
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: plasmashell
Classification: Plasma
Component: System Tray (show other bugs)
Version: 6.2.0
Platform: Arch Linux Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: 1.0
Assignee: Plasma Bugs List
URL:
Keywords: usability
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2024-10-10 16:12 UTC by Jan Bidler
Modified: 2024-11-19 18:21 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Latest Commit:
Version Fixed In: 6.2.4
Sentry Crash Report:


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Description Jan Bidler 2024-10-10 16:12:28 UTC
SUMMARY
The tooltips for entries within the expanded system tray can be quite useless. Examples (loosely translated, my system lang is not english):
- Tooltip for "Wayland to X11 Video Bridge" being "Wayland to X11 Video Bridge"
- Tooltip for "Display Configuration" (the thing where you can enable presentation mode) being "Display Configuration"
- Tooltip for "Brightness and Colors" being the wall of text of:
  "**Monitor brightness of Long Monitor Name 1 is at 30%**
   **Monitor brightness of Even Longer Monitor Name 2 is at 50%**
   **Color temperature of Nightlight at night**
   Changing to day light temperature at 01:00
   Use Scroll wheel to adjust monitor brightness.
   Middle click to disable night light"
- The tooltip for "Devices" being "There are no devices available".


I know that some of the tooltips are also used in the lower status bar where such quick info is maybe helpful for some. But in my opinion, repeating the same info that i can get by just clicking on the thing, which is almost always faster, just feels very redudant. 
I'm also unsure whether putting the shortcuts in the tooltip is the best place for them to be in. I am aware that it helps with discovery, but it feels slightly off. 
What I personally would prefer with Tooltips would be more something along the lines of "Brightness and Color" -> Adjust brightness for individual monitors or night light


SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Operating System: Arch Linux 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.0
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.6.0
Qt Version: 6.7.3
Kernel Version: 6.11.2-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Six-Core Processor
Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 570 Series
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: B450M DS3H
Comment 1 Nate Graham 2024-10-10 20:03:25 UTC
It's up to each individual widget or app to set sensible tooltip text. Most do, at least for my System Tray. A lot of your examples do seem useful to me. But I agree that "Wayland to X11 Video Bridge" is not useful.

I foresee two things we can do here:

1. For software under our control, give it a better tooltip!
2. In the System Tray, suppress any tooltip whose text is identical to the visible text. This should prevent the issue for 3rd-party apps not under our control.

Let's use this bug report for #2. For #1, can you open new bug reports for every kde app or widget whose tooltip doesn't feel useful to you?

Note that surfacing usage hints in the tooltip is definitely intentional; this is even the original usage of tooltips, in fact. So I don't foresee us removing that stuff.
Comment 2 Jan Bidler 2024-10-10 20:40:28 UTC
> Let's use this bug report for #2. For #1, can you open new bug reports for every kde app or widget whose tooltip doesn't feel useful to you?

I'm fine with that. Will try to do that within the next couple of days

> In the System Tray, suppress any tooltip whose text is identical to the visible text.

How exactly would this deal with third party applications? If you have e.g. Steam, which (afaik) can't set its own tooltip. Would it just not display any tooltip at all, or would it show something like "Options for Steam" instead? Because if no tooltip would show, that would be strange.

> Note that surfacing usage hints in the tooltip is definitely intentional; [...] So I don't foresee us removing that stuff.

Yeah I'm fine with that. It just personally feels *slightly* off to me, but I also have no clue on how to improve it. Should I find that out, I'll submit that somewhere visible.
Comment 3 Nate Graham 2024-10-11 15:45:56 UTC Comment hidden (spam)
Comment 4 Nate Graham 2024-10-11 15:47:27 UTC
> > In the System Tray, suppress any tooltip whose text is identical to the visible text.
> 
> How exactly would this deal with third party applications? If you have e.g.
> Steam, which (afaik) can't set its own tooltip. Would it just not display
> any tooltip at all, or would it show something like "Options for Steam"
> instead? Because if no tooltip would show, that would be strange.

We could just have no tooltip, yeah. If the app doesn't give us any text worth showing, I don't think there's any reason to show it anyway or try to manufacture something ourselves.
Comment 5 Bug Janitor Service 2024-11-13 23:19:33 UTC
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/4915
Comment 6 Nate Graham 2024-11-15 17:57:01 UTC
Git commit 83f83a07c5a91db19244a982d870898923f9fc3d by Nate Graham.
Committed on 15/11/2024 at 16:54.
Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'.

applets/systemtray: suppress useless tooltips

A tooltip is useless when its text is 100% identical to the visible text
of whatever you're hovering the pointer over. Let's not show them. We'll
still show the tooltip if its text is different in any way, just not if
it's identical.
FIXED-IN: 6.2.4

M  +1    -1    applets/systemtray/package/contents/ui/items/PlasmoidItem.qml
M  +1    -0    applets/systemtray/package/contents/ui/items/StatusNotifierItem.qml

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/commit/83f83a07c5a91db19244a982d870898923f9fc3d
Comment 7 Nate Graham 2024-11-15 18:29:43 UTC
Git commit 75bf470e650b5596f65af05508dcf780cfcf728e by Nate Graham.
Committed on 15/11/2024 at 17:57.
Pushed by ngraham into branch 'Plasma/6.2'.

applets/systemtray: suppress useless tooltips

A tooltip is useless when its text is 100% identical to the visible text
of whatever you're hovering the pointer over. Let's not show them. We'll
still show the tooltip if its text is different in any way, just not if
it's identical.
FIXED-IN: 6.2.4


(cherry picked from commit 83f83a07c5a91db19244a982d870898923f9fc3d)

Co-authored-by: Nate Graham <nate@kde.org>

M  +1    -1    applets/systemtray/package/contents/ui/items/PlasmoidItem.qml
M  +1    -0    applets/systemtray/package/contents/ui/items/StatusNotifierItem.qml

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/commit/75bf470e650b5596f65af05508dcf780cfcf728e
Comment 8 Bug Janitor Service 2024-11-15 21:40:32 UTC
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/4919
Comment 9 Nate Graham 2024-11-19 18:21:13 UTC
Git commit 3febb92db974d47ab175eb7c50a342278dc37eef by Nate Graham.
Committed on 19/11/2024 at 17:09.
Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'.

applets/systemtray: suppress main text of tooltip matching visible text

In this case it simply repeats what you can already see; there's no
reason to show it in the tooltip. This makes the tooltip text more
relevant.

M  +1    -1    applets/systemtray/package/contents/ui/items/PlasmoidItem.qml
M  +1    -1    applets/systemtray/package/contents/ui/items/StatusNotifierItem.qml

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/commit/3febb92db974d47ab175eb7c50a342278dc37eef