"Click to expand" info popup always getting in the way

Jeff

I find that the popup that says “Click to expand item, Shift+click to expand recursively” etc., when hovering over the left side of an item, constantly gets in the way. Since I’m so often dragging an item, or operating the expand/collapse handle, that’s a natural place to rest the mouse pointer when I want to stop and read something. But a second after I take my hand off the trackpad, the popup comes and blocks what I’m trying to read. I have to go back and move it. At first it was helpful, but after twelve hundred times, I don’t need to see it anymore!

I don’t necessarily need to disable all the info popups, probably many are useful, but this one in particular is annoying.

Jeff

I’m going to add the “Are you sure you want to delete X items” popup here, because I find it a constant annoyance. Yes, I’m sure. Really. I wish there was a “don’t show this again” option for the popups, with a “reset hidden notifications” option.

Jay

I find it annoying too, but even after all this time they’re sometimes useful. Like the one about deleting occasionally catches me deleting more items than I meant to. So I’m a little hesitant to fully disable them, although the collapsing one is much easier to go without.

I wonder if there’s a way to make them less intrusive but still useful? Have you seen any other apps that handle this well?

Jeff

Yes, the “are you sure” is sometimes useful, if you’ve made a mistake and selected more than you meant to. But for me, it’s so rarely that it’s not worth the bother of being asked every time. I’m usually pretty aware of what I’ve selected to delete, and if I make a mistake, I’ll notice it and hit “undo”. Plus there’s the “history” function. So it’s maybe once in several hundred deletes that it might actually save me a little effort, but the rest of the time, day in and day out, it’s just annoying and wastes time.

For “tool tips”, i.e. information that pops up when you hover over something, having at least a global switch in settings to disable them is helpful. A step up is to have an option for a hotkey you can use when you want to show them. For modal alerts, the best system I know of is where there’s a checkbox saying “don’t ask again” or “don’t show this again” in notifications. Then in the settings there’s a button to reset all hidden notifications. That way people can customize the notifications they find useful or not. There could be a deluxe version where you get a list of all notifications and choose which ones you want, but that might be overkill…

Jerud

Just stumbled across this, even though it’s a bit old thought I’d chip in a couple things:

While I don’t personally get annoyed by the info popups as must as Jeff does, it would probably be nice for them to be disable-able for experienced users nonetheless.
I make an exception, however, for the “are you sure” warning because it is otherwise far too easy to accidentally delete more items than intended as a result of filters. In spite of being a relatively experienced user, this popup has saved me countless times when a parent item looked ‘empty’ but in fact contained items that were filtered out of view (complete or otherwise). For that matter, any parent whose children are 100% filtered out is visually indistinguishable from a leaf-node and may be accidentally deleted without realizing it’s a parent at all. This really comes into play while working in group-by panes, which transcend the Outline structure entirely, making it very easy to lose track of what/where the item you’re selecting is.