Eliminating Tooltips

I don't like having tooltips that say things like "Chat" when my cursor is on the chat button.

The tooltips are not what gets turned off and on with the SL View/Hover Tips/Show Tips command.

Tooltips are also not something you can control with the Preferences/Popups tab.

So I popped "search replace text utility" or something like that into Google and found a free search and replace program called ReplaceEm at http://www.boolean.ca/replace/ .

The xml files with the tooltip text in a standard English language, Windows installation of SL are in:
C:\Program Files\SecondLife\skins\xui\en-us .

Using ReplaceEm's "File/New File Set" command I created a "file set" for all the files in that folder.

Using the advanced edit feature of that program, I told it to do a regular expression search, gave it tool_tip="[^"]*" as "search text", and tool_tip="" as the "replace text".

This caused it to find every place that the tooltips are defined and replace what is to be displayed with an empty string.

When the tooltip text is empty, the tooltip doesn't appear at all.

The tooltips for LSL words still appear.

Now all is well with the world.

--- addenda ----

Well, not all, there are still tooltips on the tabs in the IM window. Those are probably unfixable, since they must be generated dynamically, unlike the tooltips for the buttons at the bottom of the screen. Still, better than it was before.

Nice hack.



I think you can get rid of these, too, if you want. There's a file in the second life program files folder that contains all of those magic LSL words. You could try clearing it entirely. It might also result in those words not being hilighted in the script editor, so maybe that's not such a good idea.

I like the tooltips for the lsl words - keeping those while eliminating the rest is the challenge.

If I had my way, instead of a popup style tooltip that goes away when you start typing, a stay-there line of scripting help that could be copied and pasted would be a vast improvement. .

If you just want to effectly eliminate all the tooltips, you can use the Client/Debug Settings ToolTipDelay; set that to 30 minutes or so and you won't be much bothered with tooltips. ToolTipDelay affects the ones for the IM tabs and the scripting popup help.

Scripting popup tips are a different category of thing than popup tips for buttons; LSL keywords are not interface elements. They should not be governed by the same rules that govern the program's behavior toward interface elements like buttons.

Also, for those that use one of the lsl wikis and who don't make any use of the F1 browser, replace the HtmlHelpHomePage in the debug settings with http://lslwiki.com/lslwik.

Those who want a choice of LSL wikis in their F1 browser could store a web page with links to lslwiki.com and the other ones and whatever other resources they wanted links to, store that url in HtmlHelpHomePage, and then when they want to look up a word in the wiki they can press F1, it would go to the last page used, if that didn't suit, click the Home button and take the other wiki link or to some other resource linked to on their custom F1 help page.

It's a shame forums.secondlife.com don't work in the F1 browser, that would be exceedingly valuable educational resource for folks wanting content creation help. Even read only access would be really useful. However, some of the resident run forums do work ok in the F1 browser; if enough people would start using one of those then they too would be good sources of help with SL

I'm rambling, so I'll stop now.