Disable tooltips in Designer

the UI tooltips are horribly broken. they are always right over the cursor instead of offset up and away from the cursor and they pop up far, FAR too fast. :racing_car:

basically, can i either turn them off or adjust positioning?

5 Likes

I'm not seeing this in the designer I have opened right now, and it's an OLD version...

What version are you running ? On what OS ? what display resolution, scaling, etc ?

Ignition 8.1.27, Windoze 11, 1920x1080, no scaling.

they also do not disappear when you change fields. and these are the Designer UI tooltips, not tooltips for projects. just to be clear.

Huh. Never noticed that on any designer I've had my hands on, and I've used it on linux, windows 10 and 11, docker containers on linux and windows, various flavors of VMs, on several different resolutions...

i am particularly lucky that way... :frowning:

at any rate, are these things turn-off-able or configurable?

There is no "easy" way to do this. Perhaps there is some type of flag that could be set in the designer.prefs file, but it isn't documented, and I have no idea what it would be.

Save and reboot?

I have noticed that tooltips are far too intrusive as well, often covering up something I need to be able to see.

:poop:

i'll go dig through the designer.prefs file. thanks @lrose :+1:

Its just an XML file that is created and used to save the preferences that you have used. There isn't much in it.

This is what mine looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE properties SYSTEM "http://java.sun.com/dtd/properties.dtd">
<properties>
<comment>Designer Properties</comment>
<entry key="preview.locale">en</entry>
<entry key="tagBrowser.hiddenColumns.tag">0</entry>
<entry key="vision.grid.size">10</entry>
<entry key="vision.guide.visible">true</entry>
<entry key="vision.guide.snap">true</entry>
<entry key="vision.grid.snap">false</entry>
<entry key="most-recent-workspace">windows</entry>
<entry key="propFilter">ALL</entry>
</properties>

Can someone take a screenshot of these tooltips? I'm curious if they're coming from the Swing layer of the designer, or the jxbrowser layer.

Maybe not the best example, but in the component palette, a tooltip often covers up the thing I was looking at.

Edit, to add, I was looking at the container components, the tooltip was covering the rest of them, so I find myself fighting with tooltips. Not a huge deal, but a bit annoying sometimes.

image

I will third this annoyance.
The most prevalent place it kills me is on the Execute button of the script console.
Windows 10, Ignition 8.1.35
It will routinely block the click of the Execute button, and if you don't notice it you sit there like a dumb*ss waiting for the scripts to complete :stuck_out_tongue:
Screenshot attached.

4 Likes

If this is what we are talking about, i will also say this is annoying.
java_col9EU8iPr

3 Likes

Bandaid, but anyone really annoyed by this could try tweaking the swing tooltip manager by running any of these lines in the script console:

from javax.swing import ToolTipManager
#ToolTipManager.sharedInstance().initialDelay = 0
#ToolTipManager.sharedInstance().initialDelay = 10000
ToolTipManager.sharedInstance().enabled = False
6 Likes

Not that this is the greatest example of UI design, but one thing I've always found useful in FactoryTalk was the way the Property panel had a description that you would usually find in a tool tip.

Have often thought the component pallet in the designer would benefit from something similar. :man_shrugging:

2 Likes

I am not sure when this started but it never got in the way as much as it does now. The tool tips are constantly getting in the way of a component/ ignition features I want to press. Here is a small example but this is happing all the time where i have to reangle how I approach and access the buttons/features:

example:
I want to click the database icon on the button right* to go to the gateway fast:

What happens when i go to push it and I have to make my mouse go off and on the area again again until I find the right angle or I can not push it.:

Edit:
Ah cool when I have more time I will mess with the settings. I love the feature I just do not want it to appear on the exact location of where my mouse is pointing at. Maybe above/below or if it is long more to the left or right of my mouse pointer. Thanks!

4 Likes

If you're talking about tooltips for things like Perspective properties (e.g. hovering over session props), then these have an initial "long" delay (3s?) and then appear almost instantly after that for new items hovered over. The delay seems to reset after you click outside of the props area. Does that help?

I'll also add on my complaint about tooltips.

In the tag designer, if you're editing a tag or UDT instance that has an expression in it, if the expression is longer than the display area a tooltip will pop up showing the entire expression. This isn't a bad idea, but it completely covers the expression link button.

If a user wants to edit this expression they have to expand the tag editor to show the entire expression which will remove the tooltip. The downside is that if you have a long expression the tag editing screen may be expanded to the width of an entire monitor and the tooltip still covers the expression link icon.

As @ jacque_trahan said above, this isn't a bad feature, I just wish it would pop up somewhere else other than right over where the mouse is because the tooltip gets in the way. Maybe offset it to the top or bottom of the cursor

amen. 1000x. i don't mind a good popping tooltip. it just has to be unobtrusive. if my experiences at Xerox-Parc back in the day taught me anything: the UI should support the work, not hinder it.

any way these can be executed on launch?