# Problem statement There are many cases where I would like to have a longer preview of the textual contents of a cell, without having the input line opened in its "expanded" state (because that eats a lot of space, and not all cells have enough contents to warrant it). The only time I want to actually expand the widget is when I need to be editing it, which is not all the time. # Potential solution idea When the mouse hovers the Input Line widget, there is a tooltip (at least in the GTK3 version of LibreOffice) that only says "Input Line", which is not very useful. It would be great if instead of saying "Input Line", that tooltip provided a longer preview of the contents of that cell. GtkTooltip will automatically word-wrap long contents (of course you might want to limit to some reasonable length, like 500-1000 characters or something like that). GtkTooltip also supports markup, if you want to render bold and italics for example. If you somehow want to preserve the "Input Line" widget name into the tooltip, you could append the contents below it, with \n\n (but personally, I would not really recommend having both; the contents are much more relevant than the widget name, in my opinion). Long hyperlinks could maybe be shortened (to max 25 characters or so?) within the tooltip to provide more space for actual text contents, because hyperlinks are not clickable within tooltips anyway. This could probably be an EasyHack. ----------- Observed on: Version: 24.2.4.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community Build ID: 51a6219feb6075d9a4c46691dcfe0cd9c4fff3c2 CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 6.9; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3 Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US Flatpak Calc: threaded
(In reply to Jeff Fortin Tam from comment #0) > If you somehow want to preserve the "Input Line" widget name into the > tooltip, At least for newbies, for empty cells I would leave the "Input Line" text within the tooltip widget, since there is no cell content anyway. For cells with content (or at least with long content, or with multiple lines), sounds a potential benefit, with at least one caveat: the tooltip might bother to see the first rows of the main area (whichever rows might be, depending on the view). Please also remember that the widget is displayed whether the input line is being edited or not, as long as the mouse hovers over it. So, considering that a bigger tooltip might bother seeing/reading other relevant areas, this must be thoroughly discussed and tested under different conditions (screen size / screen resolution / dpi /OS/DE) and practical usability. Maybe this should only be allowed/blocked, depending on some Calc's option (but not within the document anyway).
UX/Design team, what do you think?
-1 to a tooltip on the input line since we show information about the control not the content, and it would be not really convenient to select a cell and move the cursor over the input line in order to understand the cell content +0.5 for a tooltip on the cell itself; there are many use cases where you never want to get something in your way and at least an option is required I wonder what scenario requires to have partially hidden content that you need to read but more often than by just expanding the input line, wrapping the text, and/or expanding the width. Is it a real world use case?
But the input line TB can be expanded to its default 6 lines, and is stateful and can be dragged back down to just 2 lines, or again collapsed. The "toggle" with 2,3,4... lines is quite functional as is to "get it out of the way". See no reason to provide cell content as an "on mouse-over tooltip". -1
Not much excitement about this idea, resolving WF for now.