Lorenzo Sutton posted on Fri, 16 Feb 2024 18:33:47 +0100 as excerpted: > I have an issue with tooltip position and (possibly) mouse cursor > (size). > > My mouse cursor is set to Adwanita with a size of 48 and many > application tooltips seem to 'ignore' or miscalculate the actual cursor > size and place the tooltip right under the cursor - typically the 'tail' > of the arrow pointer - I imagine the expected size is 24 (which I > believe is the default size in most themes). > > The problem is that often tooltips hold valuable information which gets > hidden in this way. I've been noticing this for some time. The bad news is that while I see you're still on 5, it continues in kde/plasma6 (live-git tho I last updated on the 8th, I'll probably update again tonight). More on versions below. The good news is that while at one point it was *REALLY* bad -- the tooltips were appearing directly under the cursor "hot point", making it difficult to actually click -- that's not the case any more -- as your mashup image indicates, they're now under the cursor tail, not the hot- point, so it's at least possible to click without playing dodge-the- tooltip! Tho the "under the hotpoint" bug may not have hit actual releases and/or may have been wayland-only (you say X; I'm wayland-only with the only X I have installed being xwayland). And they've cut down on the "too many" tooltips problem, where they just say the same thing the button they're pointed at says or for common stuff like the windeco buttons, too. > I can't find a pattern for this with UI toolkits apart from the fact > that some specific GTK applicaitons like GIMP and Inkscape seem to > correctly 'shift' tooltips out of the way of the mouse cursor > (calculating better its actual size) as expected. At a guess it's gtk3 apps that work. At least, all my gtk3 apps seem to have the tooltips out of the way of the actual cursor, tho firefox seems to have them /just/ out of the way while claws has them /well/ out of the way. Maybe gtk3 has adjustment builtin now, while claws is still adding its own distance calculation from before the buildin, so the tooltip ends up double-spaced away there. Presumably gtk4 would have it too, but not gtk2 (it's likely they dealt with it for the wayland port even if it's the same on X, because window handling is so different on wayland a LOT of things needed redone where the X code likely hadn't been touched in years, and I don't believe gtk2 was ported), if you still have any gtk2 apps around, and perhaps not individual apps that override the default handling. Also, if you're running flatpack apps or the like, I'm not sure if the cursor size would be propagated through properly, and even if it is they're loading their own copies of libs from the flatpack (sort of like static linking as it's their own lib copy, but not, as it's dynamically loaded, just from the flatpack not the system), so it's possible they could be running older pre-fix versions. > Theme and 'application style' are Breeze. Changing these (apart from > resetting the cursor to whatever the theme includes), doesn't seem to > mitigate the issue. Confirmed. Oxygen app-style here, a slightly patched (less padding around the title for a thinner titlebar) oxygen windeco, mellowgrey plasma style (kde4 vintage, IIRC) from kde-look, and a custom color scheme. (Global theme says oxygen too but I don't believe I've ever touched that, setting individual elements as above instead.) > Here is a screenshot mashup of different applications where I'm > experiencing the issue: > > https://pasteboard.co/uwMmtlGjcCaF.png FWIW, I was getting a no such image error at first, but turned out it was because I have uBlock Origin set to (high-security) default-reject off- site connections and it needed gcdnb.pbrd.co allowed (from pasteboard.co, of course, presumably pbrd is them too, but it only needed the gcdnb subdomain thereof). Then it worked. =:^) Anyway, thanks for including the image link as it confirmed the exact behavior I'm seeing here. > Any ideas or hints to any settings or theme hacks for this? > > This is with X and the following versions: > KDE Plasma: 5.27.10 QT version: 5.15.12 > > Running on Manjaro with the whole KDE desktop installed. Gentoo here, wayland (as I said above, the only X installed is the xwayland shim to run X apps on wayland). I run the kde/plasma desktop (exclusively but for CLI and weston as a backup compositor) but it's a "lite" version, no semantic-desktop integration (no akonadi or baloo), no policykit, no pipewire or pulseaudio (alsa-only)... and only plasma- desktop plus selected apps and their deps (so missing a couple frameworks that aren't deps and without various apps including anything kdepim related due to the kdepimlibs akonadi dependency). So the kde/plasma desktop, but slimmed down and without some of the family of apps some might include in their definition of "whole kde desktop". Which slims things down enough, along with smart-live-rebuild so I'm not rebuilding live packages that haven't actually updated, to run the live- git versions of installed kde-frameworks/plasma/apps along with a few tightly kde-integrated non-framework deps (like plasma-wayland-protocols and phonon). The live-git packages are from the gentoo/kde overlay. As soon as gentoo/kde had kde6 builds available I switched to it where I could, tho like the kde upstream code, the gentoo/kde builds took some time to stabilize, so initially I had to manually handle some of the dependencies and not everything was available immediately so the plasma desktop itself remained 5.x for awhile, as did some apps. But about 3-4 weeks ago I finally got rid of the last kde5 stuff except the qt5 compatibility stuff for vlc, etc, and by about two weeks ago I had found alternatives for all my qt5 stuff (the gtk-based celluloid replacing vlc being the last one, phonon is installed as a dep without a backend now making my "plasma-lite" installation even "liter"!), and had the qt5 compatibility stuff turned off for kde as well, finally allowing me to uninstall qt5 itself. As for what that kde/plasma6-live-git (again, last updated back on the 8th) reports itself as, from kde system-setting about (qt is release version, the other two live-git reporting as...): System Settings Version 6.0.80 KDE Frameworks Version 6.0.0 Qt 6.6.1 The wayland windowing system As for ideas/hints... You might try different cursor themes. One set I downloaded recently (using the builtin download functionality in the kde cursor control panel) was "Empty Butterfly" in various colors. "Butterfly" in this case refers to the delta-wing shape of the primary pointer, while "Empty" refers to the fact that the interior is transparent -- the cursors are outlines in the chosen color, with the inside "empty" or transparent. Included sizes are 32,48,64,96, but note that you may need to go a size larger than normal for visibility due to the empty inside. This is what I'm using at present -- in the 96 size. While the issue is still there, because the interior is transparent the effect isn't as bad -- while a letter of the tooltip might be obscured by the non-transparent outline, it's normally only one, and the word can be guessed/read based on context. A very similar "Empty" set is available too, with the more traditional arrow replacing the delta-wing/butterfly that I preferred. You might prefer it since I see from the images that your current primary cursor is a traditional arrow. A note on installation, however: Apparently the author doesn't run Linux and just made their MS/Apple cursor theme available on Linux for those who want to use it. As such, they apparently misunderstood the formerly X now XDG/freedesktop cursor specification, or maybe the command for the archive format they used, and the cursor files end up installed, IIRC, a subdir too deep. So the cursor theme didn't actually show up in plasma's cursor control panel even tho it said it was installed. But once I figured out what happened it was easy enough to find the files and move them up a subdir to match the arrangement working cursor themes used. Then they worked. (Actually, while I was at it I manually moved them to the system dir, /usr/share/icons/, of course changing ownership and permissions appropriately. =:^) FWIW I have a few other cursor themes installed too, but until this bug gets fixed the "empty" ones seem more practical. Meanwhile, "bug" is exactly what this is. But it hasn't irritated me enough to go looking to see if a bug is filed on it yet, filing one myself if not. If you find or file such a bug, please post a link to it here, so I can CC as well. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman