What Is Tooltip?

Do you know what it is like? A picture's worth a thousand words. If you're like us, sometimes you need some more words. You can only sometimes stare at your screen at the right angle to get all the necessary information. Sometimes, the thing you want to know is just too far away from your cursor or mouse pointer, or maybe it's too small to even see without getting up close and personal with your screen. If only magical tools could give us relevant information about whatever we're looking at, like a tooltip! Huh, what was that? Have you never heard of a tooltip before? Well, how about now: A tooltip is a graphical user interface (GUI) element used with the cursor or mouse pointer to display information about an item without needing to click on it. The typical scenario for summoning a tooltip is hovering the mouse cursor over another GUI element, such as a tool icon in a software application, which is also prevalently used on websites. That's right! Tooltips! Tooltips are those little boxes that pop up when you hover your mouse over a toolbar button or other object in an application. They provide contextual and usage information to the various application tools without consulting lengthy manuals and other documentation. As you can see, tooltips come in all shapes and sizes. But what are they exactly? In short, a tooltip is a small text that appears when you hover over an object or tool. Depending on the application, it can display anything from the full name of the object mouse is hovering on to displaying additional information or a detailed explanation of what that tool or thing does. For example, when hovering over a file in Windows Explorer, details of that file, such as its format type, size and date modified fields, are displayed; hovering over the local drive partition displays free space and the total length of the drive. Microsoft refers to their tooltips as "ScreenTips.