Xfce Forum

forcedtopicksomething

Member

Registered: 2023-07-26

Posts: 71

How to disable the Thunar "Side Pane" tooltips?

About a month ago, I asked about how to disable the "Show Desktop" tooltip constantly showing, but it has received no response: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?pid=81101#p81101

The other serious annoyance in XFCE in terms of tooltips is in Thunar. Whenever you hover over any item in the "Side Pane", it pops up an ugly "full path" tooltip which I've never once needed but always found extremely distracting and annoying.

For unfathomable reasons, this too has no setting in the Thunar settings, just like the "Show Desktop" settings have no way to turn its tooltip off.

I'm not trying to turn off all tooltips *entirely*, because in other situations they are crucial. (Also, even when I tried to do so out of desperation, by reading old instructions online, it didn't even work.)

How can I disable these obnoxious things? It *must* be possible. It's too absurd that something made for powerusers by powerusers would force this onto the user. I find myself wasting so much time and energy just trying to hunt down ways to disable various idiotic things because everything is at best hidden deeply in some configuration file. I don't even get why they would add these things in the first place or have them on by default.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,341

Re: How to disable the Thunar "Side Pane" tooltips?

The only way they can be disabled is if the developer adds a preference within the code. Currently you can only disable them (or rather make them transparent) system-wide. AFAIK, GTK3 does not support widget-based tooltip CSS capabilities. xfdesktop, for example, has built-in functionality to disable tooltips (Settings > Desktop Icons > "Show icon tooltips").

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forcedtopicksomething

Member

Registered: 2023-07-26

Posts: 71

Re: How to disable the Thunar "Side Pane" tooltips?

That's very disappointing to hear.

I truly don't understand this (and many other similar situations). Don't the people who made/make Xfce/Thunar/Show Desktop use these things themselves? Wouldn't they long ago have personally encountered how annoying these tooltips are, and not required anyone to ask about/report it, but simply either not have them show up in the first place, or put in a configuration option to disable it? Even if it's not a GUI preference, it should at least be possible with some kind of configuration line somewhere. As it is now, I'm constantly needlessly annoyed by my desktop environment when these things pop up. (And Xfce is the best/least bad, so there is nothing else to switch to.)