793348 - Add tooltips on tabs, at least when the name is truncated due to lack of space

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Other Applications :: ChatZilla, enhancement)

Description

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:18.0) Gecko/18.0 Firefox/18.0 SeaMonkey/2.15a1 ID:20120921003032 c-c:dbd153b0fa9c m-c:9ae014a115b2

ChatZilla 0.9.89

When there are many tabs, their labels become truncated, first with ellipsis ("…") in the middle, and then without anything, to the point where, if there are really many tabs, their labels disappear completely. This makes it hard to click the right tab to see what happens in it, or maybe to /say something in it.

It is true that the tab URL appears on the statusbar on mouseover, but that is out of the way and (depending on the theme in use) it may be small print and/or low-contrast.

It would be nice to have a tooltip with the tab name (e.g. #chatzilla for a certain channel tab, ChanServ for a certain query tab, moznet for a certain server tab, *client* for the client tab) when hovering the mouse over it, at least when the tab name is not fully displayed, possibly also if it has been changed by means of the /rename command. KDE Konversation (which has no /rename command AFAIK) does it already for tabs whose displayed name is truncated.

Comment 1

[Donald Sarratt]

Attachment: Added tooltips to tabs

It appears that there's no way to detect whether a tab has been cropped or not, Bug 514763 was already submitted to request this feature. In the meantime we can either have tooltips always on, always off, or controlled via a preference. I've added a patch that turns them always on, is there any downside to this?

Comment 2

[Donald Sarratt]

Attachment: Added tooltips to tabs

It appears that there's no way to detect whether a tab has been cropped or not, Bug 514763 was already submitted to request this feature. In the meantime we can either have tooltips always on, always off, or controlled via a preference. I've added a patch that turns them always on, is there any downside to this?

Comment 3

[James Ross]

Comment on attachment 687462 [details] [diff] [review]
Added tooltips to tabs

Review of attachment 687462 [details] [diff] [review]:
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Might be an idea to use just the original name (with no match suffix like "<2>") for the tooltip. Any thoughts?

Either way, r=silver.

Comment 4

[Donald Sarratt]

Attachment: Alternative patch (without numbers in tooltips)

(In reply to James Ross from comment #3)
> Might be an idea to use just the original name (with no match suffix like
> "<2>") for the tooltip. Any thoughts?

Since the tooltips show the original tab label without reflecting renaming, it makes sense to show the original label without a suffix. Though I rarely get into a situation where I'd use these tooltips, so I'm probably not the best person to ask. 

This patch will show tooltips without the number suffixes, so whichever route is preferred we have a patch for.

Comment 5

[James Ross]

http://hg.mozilla.org/chatzilla/rev/d03ab473094c

Comment 6

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0 SeaMonkey/2.17a1 ID:20121217003028 c-c:48e23cbddfa8 m-c:c8a1314aa449

Hard for me to tell which exact cZ changeset except that the build ID tells me it was approximately 1½ days after comment #5

After updating ChatZilla to the version distributed with this SeaMonkey build as /usr/local/seamonkey/distribution/extensions/{59c81df5-4b7a-477b-912d-4e0fdf64e5f2}.xpi , and restarting, all of the following have tooltips:
*client* tab
server   tab   (e.g. moznet)
#channel tab   (e.g. #chatzilla)
query    tab   (e.g. NickServ)

Tooltips are present on all tabs regardless of whether or not the tab name has an ellipsis in the middle due to clipping, and also regardless of whether or not *any* tab has an ellipsis in the middle. 

Where the /rename command has been used, the tooltip displays the name as it was before all renames (including the stars for *client* and the number sign before #channel).

=> VERIFIED.

Comment 7

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

P.S. When tabs of the same name (e.g. NickServ) are present for more than one than one server, there is of course a possible ambiguity, but this is not a real hardship since (a) it is to be hoped that tabs for different servers will not open interlaced (if necessary they can be regrouped by d&d), and (2) we still have the status line to distinguish e.g. irc://moznet/NickServ,isnick from irc://freenode/nickServ,isnick