Subject: bug#6595: 24.0.50; tooltip doc

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2010 10:52:51 -0700

The tooltip doc is not so great.
 
Node Tooltips of the Emacs manual says nothing about tooltip mode being
enabled by default.  And it says nothing about option
`tooltip-use-echo-area'.
 
More generally, it nowhere explains clearly what the recommended way of
moving help to the echo area is (i.e. not using tooltips).  There is an
option, `tooltip-use-echo-area', whose doc tells you that if you want
help to appear in the echo area then you should customize this to
non-nil and enable tooltip mode.
 
But why?  Why is there this separate option, in addition to the option
`tooltip-mode', whose customization to nil has the same effect of moving
help to the echo area?
 
This is not clear to me.  Either there is a design flaw - perhaps
`tooltip-use-echo-area' should be removed, or more likely something is
simply missing from the doc.  Please explain - make this topic clear to
users.

In GNU Emacs 24.0.50.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600)
 of 2010-06-28 on 3249CTO
Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 5.1.2600
configured using `configure --with-gcc (4.4) --no-opt --cflags -Ic:/xpm/include'