[X-Newbies] shut off tool tips

[Rob Griffiths]

On Jan 24, 2007, at 1:09 PM, Peter Saint James wrote:

> 	Tool tips (the little flags that appear when the cursor touches a  
> particular item) are handy sometimes but they get in the way.  Is  
> there a way to shut them off in apps like Mail, Stickies, iMovie,  
> and others?  I find nothing in preferences for these apps.

I'm not aware of any way to just disable them, but there are some  
preferences that control how they work -- they're listed in this tip  
on the macosxhints site:

   http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061107125819464

In particular, this command will set the delay before activation to

   defaults write -g NSInitialToolTipDelay -int 10000

That will set the global default for the delay before tool tip  
activation to 10,000 milliseconds (10 seconds), which should greatly  
reduce the incidence of accidental pop-ups. This will affect only  
those programs launched after you run the command.

I'm not sure if there are any downsides to increasing the number even  
higher than that.

-rob.