In Vim, can you show a tooltip where the cursor is?

Question

Is there a way to display a tooltip (like a popdown menu, but just with text), where the cursor is, using VimScript?

Answer 1

If you mean a tooltip where the mouse cursor is, then you can do this by turning the ballooneval option on and setting the bexpr option to point to a function that returns your required tooltip. This is only available if you're using a vim compiled with +balloon_eval (see :version). Have a look at my (rather basic) tag balloons script for an example.

If you mean a tooltip where the normal vim cursor is, I don't think there's a very clean way to do this. You could create a custom menu with the text that you want (using amenu) and map the command to :nop<CR> and use :popup to display it:

amenu ]MyMenuName.The\ Text\ You\ Want :nop<CR>
popup ]MyMenuName

However, this will only work in the Win32 and GTK GUIs.

I don't know of a way to use the insert mode popup menu (the one used for Ctrl-P and omnicompletion etc) to just display some text. You could abuse the completion method to give your own text as the completion alternative and set menuone in completeopt to allow a single line to be shown, but it would probably overwrite the current text with the contents of the popup menu. It would probably also break omnicompletion!