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There seems to be no option available for changing the tooltip duration. Is there any way to do so?

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  • I will give you the full details early tomorrow.
    – RolandiXor
    Nov 23, 2010 at 5:57
  • @Roland Looking forward to it.
    – Gödel
    Nov 23, 2010 at 7:09

3 Answers 3

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If you are running compiz, this is a rather easy change to do. First you need to install Compizconfig Settings Manager. It will appear in your preferences menu.

Now, what you want to change is in the animations plugin. Choose close animation and add a new value, with fade as the animation (and type=Tooltip for window match), and add change the duration of it and then change the values as you wish (they are in milliseconds). They get applied automatically.

With a little tweaking, you can have tooltips that appear to last on screen for a very long period of time, or tooltips that immediately disappear once you move the mouse away. The major drawback is that with this method, your tooltips will fade in some way. You could make them last even longer by adding an open animation with similar options. alt text

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  • This is one creative solution. Thanks for sharing.
    – Gödel
    Nov 23, 2010 at 22:47
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I haven't tested it, but something like this should work:

Edit your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and insert 

gtk-tooltip-timeout = 300

You will need to restart apps to make them see it.

Sources:

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  • I tried it, but it doesn't seem to be working under my system which is using gtk 2.20.1. Setting it disables tooltip functionality somehow. The property, they say, is available in gtk+ 2.12 and pabove, though.
    – Gödel
    Nov 24, 2010 at 1:47
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In my case it is unclutter that is causing the tooltips to disappear after less than 1s -- you can edit /etc/default/unclutter to modify the timeout or disable it (system-wide), but I found that adding the -grab option avoids the tooltip disappearing while still hiding the cursor like before:

...
# Options passed to unclutter, see 'man unclutter' for details.
EXTRA_OPTS="-idle 1 -root -grab"

One side-effect I noticed so far is that touchpad scrolling won't work until you move the pointer slightly to make it re-apper. A click sometimes needs two attempts as the initial click only serves to re-show the pointer and only the second event is sent to the apps. This kind-of makes sense but it would have been better if this was the case only after 10-15 seconds.

Gnome / gtk in itself, as far as I was able to investigate, has no setting for tooltip duration because the tooltips are not supposed to disappear in the first place.

The compiz fade-out duration hack works for only up to 4s and is annoying in that the tooltip will fade out slowly even when you now want to see a different tooltip. (I'm not allowed to comment on other replies)

As for the gtk-tooltip-timeout setting, apart from having been deprecated without replacement, it was for setting the time before a tooltip appears, not its duration.

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