[layer8]

Tooltips appear below the mouse pointer. By the way, this is an important reason to use OS mechanisms for UI features like that, which take care of such details, and not (having to) roll your own. Another standard feature of tooltips is that they remain on screen for a configurable amount of time (OS setting) and you can move the mouse during that time, should it obscure the tooltip for some reason.

[chrismorgan]

I don’t know what OS you’re talking about, but that’s basically never been true on Windows. Native tooltips don’t natively try to dodge the cursor, and there’s no configuration of times and such, and not much actually even uses the original native stuff any more, nor should it. And as regards dodging the cursor, I don’t know of a single piece of software that actually queries the cursor in order to dodge it—though my dad told me years ago he’d implemented such a thing personally back somewhere around 2000.

This wasn’t much of a problem in the past, because the largest cursors shipped out of the box were only two or three times as big, and not much would collide. But in I think 2019 Windows 10 gave you a colour and size selector, and it extends the range past 1–3 all the way up to 15, which I think might have been 256×256 or something, which is absolutely huge and I actually had a lot of fun deliberately doing bright orange size 15 cursor for a whole week when that feature first came out, before eventually settling on 4, which is still way bigger than people are used to, and well worth it, in my opinion, except that for size 3 and beyond, tooltips get occluded, and so I’d lose the first couple of letters of tooltips. (I like the way macOS enlarges the cursor if you shake it about, so you can find it if you lost it.)

Huh, just checked the original Firefox bug from 2004, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248718, and it looks like they’ve finally fixed this after twenty years, in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712669. Still took five more years of occasional complaints, but I wonder if Windows making it so easy to get bad tooltips has pushed more software to fix their tooltip placement. Nice to see, even if it’s too late to benefit me any more.

Of course, on the web you can’t do it properly with in-DOM tooltips; only with native tooltips, which are unfortunately very limited and often unsuitable for other reasons.

—⁂—

Now as for Linux + Wayland… ugh. The situation is still laughably bad. I use Sway, `output eDP-1 scale 1.5` and `seat seat0 xcursor_theme Adwaita 96`, and the cursor still appears at at least three different sizes, depending on the app. It used to be five. GTK is just ignoring the size thing so I can’t judge it, Qt seems to be actually positioning tooltips sanely these days, avoiding the cursor, which I don’t think it did four years ago. Good show.