Getting rid of 'balloons'

[sktsee]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:51:34 -0500, Cybe R. Wizard wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:46:58 -0400
> Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> There must be a
>> setting that you can edit with gconf-editor or gconftool2 to prevent
>> balloons from popping up.
> 
> Since this has once again come up I have been pouring over gconf-editor
> with no more luck than last time.  I'm afraid GNOME doesn't allow it.
> 
> 
$ echo "gtk-enable-tooltips = 0" >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0

will nuke all tooltips except for the metacity decorator bar tooltip
because -- from what I can tell -- it's fixed in the source code to 
display no matter what the theme, or what any gtk resource files specify. 
Although, I could be wrong about that and just haven't figure out where 
or what to change to get rid of it.
 
If you want to retain tooltips, but would rather lengthen the delay before
one pops up, say to 2secs instead of the default 500 milliseconds, then type:

$ echo "gtk-tooltip-timeout = 2000" >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0

Again, this setting has no effect on metacity. However, for lucid there's 
supposed to be a new gconf setting as outlined in this bug report, 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/metacity/+bug/519856 which allows you to 
disable metacity tooltips. I'm still on Karmic so I can't test whether
the setting works or not.

-- 
sktsee