ADR-0063: Hover tooltips for glyph controls
- Status: Accepted
- Date: 2026-09-04
- Deciders: jka
- Decision: D63
Context
Several header controls are bare glyphs (the refresh buttons, the hidden-files toggle) with no label saying what they do.
Decision
A small tooltip facility, tooltip $w $text, names such controls. A single shared
borderless toplevel appears about 600 ms after the pointer rests on a control, below
it and kept on screen, and hides when the pointer leaves. Calling tooltip again
replaces the text, so a control whose meaning changes can relabel itself.
The tooltip uses the classic Windows look (pale yellow, black text, one-pixel dark border) regardless of theme. It is the one element that deliberately ignores theme roles: it is momentary, and black on yellow is legible over any theme.
Consequences
- Any bare-glyph control can be named with one line.
- Every glyph-only control added later is expected to carry a tooltip.