294)* How can I implement "bubble help" or "tool tips" with Motif?

[Last modified: Jan 02]

Answer: Open Motif 2.2 includes a built-in ToolTips feature.  The following
material may be of interest to users of earlier versions of Motif.

Gary Aviv (gary@compgen.com) informed this maintainer about the free LiteClue
widget from Computer Generation, Inc. (http://www.compgen.com/).  LiteClue is
a widget which pops a one line help message when the user passes the pointer
over another "watched" widget. This is known by various names in the industry
such as hints, clues, tips, bubble help and balloon help. Technical
documentation and source for the LiteClue widget are available from:

http://www.compgen.com/widgets/LiteClue.html
ftp://ftp.compgen.com/pub/widgets/LiteClue.tar.Z


Ken Lee (http://www.rahul.net/kenton/) writes: A simple technique is to popup
a shell containing your message whenever an enter event occurs (possibly
delayed by a timer) and pop it down again after a leave event.

David Lewis (dbl@ics.com) writes: To those resources I should add that the
XmHTML sources (HTML parser, browser, etc) have this ToolTip/bubble-help/popup
feature, in readily-usable code. In addition, the ICS EnhancementPak widget
set (http://www.ics.com) has both a toolbar with built-in popups for its
entries and a small library which adds popup capabilities to any widget.