Tooltip (Python) Marta Maria Casetti mmcasetti@gmail.com 2012 Add tips to your widgets Tooltip

A toolbar with a tooltip (with an image) for a button.

This example builds on the Toolbar example.

Code used to generate this example
Useful methods for a Tooltip widget

set_tooltip_text(text) and set_tooltip_markup(text) can be used to add a tooltip of plain text (or text in the Pango Markup Language) to a widget.

For more complex tooltips, for instance for a tooltip with an image:

Set the "has-tooltip" property of the widget to True; this will make GTK+ monitor the widget for motion and related events which are needed to determine when and where to show a tooltip.

Connect to the "query-tooltip" signal. This signal will be emitted when a tooltip is supposed to be shown. One of the arguments passed to the signal handler is a GtkTooltip object. This is the object that we are about to display as a tooltip, and can be manipulated in your callback using functions like set_icon(). There are functions for setting the tooltip's markup (set_markup(text)), setting an image from a stock icon (set_icon_from_stock(stock_id, size)), or even putting in a custom widget (set_custom(widget)).

Return True from your query-tooltip handler. This causes the tooltip to be show. If you return False, it will not be shown.

In the probably rare case where you want to have even more control over the tooltip that is about to be shown, you can set your own GtkWindow which will be used as tooltip window. This works as follows:

Set "has-tooltip" and connect to "query-tooltip" as before.

Use set_tooltip_window() on the widget to set a GtkWindow created by you as tooltip window.

In the "query-tooltip" callback you can access your window using get_tooltip_window() and manipulate as you wish. The semantics of the return value are exactly as before, return True to show the window, False to not show it.

API References

In this sample we used the following:

GtkTooltip

GtkToolbar

GtkWidget

Stock Items