Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Tooltip delay in Windows

I was in a rush to finish something at work in the last couple of days and while I usually don't mind it that much, as I was quickly moving the mouse across the code and frantically writing new code, Eclipse was showing so many tooltip it was driving me nuts! I spent a couple of days googling every now and then for a solution with no joy... Apparently there's lots of suggestions out there on how to disable tooltips altogether, increase the tooltip timeout and even some suggesting a relation between menus delay and tooltip delay. Finally, my pain was brought to an end when I decided to look for "hover" (the term used in Eclipse) in TweakUI settings and it was right there under my nose!

A peek using RegMon reveals that the setting goes into HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse\MouseHoverTime (REG_SZ) registry key. Now at 300 (note the value is in milliseconds), with my sanity restored I'll get back to work now! I believe the same key applies to Windows Vista.

6 comments :

  1. Dan, thanks for posting; I'd never heard of TweakUI but installed it after reading your post and now got rid of these annoying super fast hover tooltips in eclipse, thanks!

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  2. Hi Willem,

    Glad to hear someone else found this useful too :-) TweakUI is a great tool, wish Microsoft would write a similar one for Vista, maybe in time, who knows.

    - Dan

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  3. Hi,

    This thing was driving me crazy in Eclipse as well, so I'm glad I found your post! Thanks alot!

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  4. I had the exact same problem as you right now. I installed some shitty "speed up your PC" software that set the tooltip timer practically to 0 and it was annoying the shit out of me in Eclipse.

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  5. Thank you sooo much.
    I like Tweak UI and usually I like tool-tips appear quickly, but in an IDE it becomes a nightmare. I just didn't realize Eclipse was impacted by this setting too.
    BIIIG thanks!

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