GtkSharp: Tooltips

Tooltips are the little text strings that pop up when you leave your pointer over a button or other widget for a few seconds. They are easy to use, so I will just explain them without giving an example. If you want to see some code, take a look at the testgtk.cs program distributed with Gtk#. Widgets that do not receive events (widgets that do not have their own window) will not work with tooltips.

The first call you will use creates a new tooltip. You only need to do this once for a set of tooltips as the GtkTooltips object this function returns can be used to create multiple tooltips.

Tooltips tooltips = new Tooltips();

Once you have created a new tooltip, and the widget you wish to use it on, simply use this call to set it:

tooltip1.SetTip(widget, tooltipText, tooltipPrivate);

The first argument is the widget you wish to have this tooltip pop up for, followed by the text you wish it to say. The last argument is a text string that can be used as an identifier when using GtkTipsQuery to implement context sensitive help. For now, you can set it to null.

Here’s a short example:

Tooltips tooltips1 = new Tooltips();
Widget button1 = new Button ("button 1");
tooltips1.SetTip(button, "This is button 1", null);

You can use the Enable and Disable methods to turn tooltips on or off.