Question

When the mouse hovers on the modeline, a few lines of help appear (depending on the context).

How do I disable this help? I would like to do so because (at least for Emacs 23 on OS X Lion), the help does not go away if I switch to another program without moving the mouse.

Answer 1

If you mean a tooltip by “a few lines of help”, you can let help strings be displayed in the echo area rather than a pop-up window:

(tooltip-mode nil)                      ; one-line help text in the echo area

or

(setq tooltip-use-echo-area t)          ; multi-line help text in the echo area

In case that you want Emacs not to display help strings at all, you can set the show-help-function variable to nil:

(tooltip-mode nil)
(setq show-help-function nil)

---

C-hftooltip-mode

When Tooltip mode is disabled, Emacs displays one line of the help text in the echo area, and does not make a pop-up window.

C-hvtooltip-use-echo-area

Use the echo area instead of tooltip frames for help and GUD tooltips. To display multi-line help text in the echo area, set this to t and enable tooltip-mode.

32.19.4 Properties with Special Meanings, GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual

Variable: show-help-function

If this variable is non-nil, it specifies a function called to display help strings. These may be help-echo properties, menu help strings, or tool bar help strings. The specified function is called with one argument, the help string to display. Tooltip mode provides an example.