Tombuntu

Turn Off GNOME Panel Tooltips with Compiz Fusion

In the current version of GNOME there is no way to turn off tooltips on the panel. This is an annoyance when using the Compiz Fusion Window Previews plugin, which shows a thumbnail of a window. The yellow GNOME tooltip stills shows up under the fancy Compiz preview.

The perfect solution would be GNOME having an option to turn off tooltips for window list items. But I found a way to solve the problem using Compiz Fusion on the Compiz Fusion blog.

Open General Options in the CompizConfig Settings Manager. Go to the Opacity Settings tab and add an item to the window opacities list. You can match only the GNOME panel tooltips with this code:

(name=gnome-panel & type=tooltip)

Then set the opacity to zero and the tooltips will be totally invisible. Tooltips for programs running in the system tray still show up like they should.

A lot of cool stuff is possible with the advanced settings that Compiz offers. I made my panel semi-transparent, which works better than the GNOME option to do so because it affects the menus also. Here are the settings I used:

opacity windows: (name=gnome-panel)
value: 1778

Compiz Fusion tooltips

Archived Comments

Brian

You should be able to uncheck /apps/panel/global/tooltips_enabled in gconf.

taurusx5

Hi, tom. I have a problem with opera in ubuntu 7.10. When I run opera in full screen, the screen flickers whenever I right click on my mouse. One option is to disable compiz-fusion or visual effects. But, do you know how I can eliminate the flickering without having to disable compiz-fusion? Thanks!

Simon

Awesome, been trying to figure out how to do this for *months*…

tommy_b

I know this was driving me crazy exactly because the tooltips would NOT go away by unselecting them in gconf.

thanks tom!

Alan

I agree with Simon… Awesome.

I’ve been wanting this for a couple of years.

Thank you very much.

Marco

@taurusx5: You have checked the option that allows fullscreen windows to be drawn without redirection to textures (general options). When only one fullscreen window is visible (opera, mplayer, …) will draw that window directly instead of rendering it to a texture and then render that texture with window decorations on the desktop. As soon as you right-click you open a second window and compiz can no longer render the opera window directly on screen. For example the menu you open could be blurred transparent and require the ‘background’ as a texture. So compiz starts rendering everything to texture again and this is where the flickering occurs. This feature is most useful for games I think. Just uncheck the option in compiz if you don’t play fullscreen games.

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