26.17 Tooltips

Tooltips are small windows that display text information at the current mouse position. They activate when there is a pause in mouse movement. There are two types of tooltip: help tooltips and GUD tooltips.

Help tooltips typically display over text—including the mode line—but are also available for other parts of the Emacs frame, such as the tool bar and menu items.

You can toggle display of help tooltips (Tooltip mode) with the command M-x tooltip-mode. When Tooltip mode is disabled, the help text is displayed in the echo area instead.

GUD tooltips show values of variables. They are useful when you are debugging a program. See section Debugger Operation.

The variables tooltip-delay specifies how long Emacs should wait before displaying a tooltip. For additional customization options for displaying tooltips, use M-x customize-group <RET> tooltip <RET>. See section X Options and Resources, for information on customizing the windows that display tooltips.