Add help text to widgets

Feature Requests
1

It would be nice to able to add help text inside of widgets and then maybe when hovering on a widget a little “?” appears which the user can click to get more information about the widget. Currently some models have notes on the interface to explain what widgets do. This would allow for getting rid of those notes and just displaying that information when the user wants it.

2

Turtle Universe has a similar feature through its custom JSON structure. It would be nice for NetLogo 7 to add it officially.

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3

I agree, this would be a good enhancement.
John and I discussed it for a while with Turtle Universe and he implemented something like it there.

-Uri

4

Just to clarify - are you talking about help text that a user adds to say more about that specific widget?

5

I’m talking about help text that a model author/creator would add to widgets to make the interface more easily understandable to others using the model.

6

I think it would be useful to have some sort of tagging functionality, where you could tag a widget (or just use its global variable name) and then reference that tag in the Info tab, and it would automatically take that portion of text and turn it into a tooltip for the corresponding widget. This would allow model authors to consolidate all of their informational text in the Info tab, while still allowing users to more easily figure out what each widget does. But that could be too complex, I’d have to see it in action to know for sure.

Isaac B.

7

I think that is a good idea and we had discussed it before, but I’m not convinced that should be the only way to add info to a widget. I think some users would really like that and some would find it unintuitive or cumberseom. I think the options are:

  1. You can add text in the widget dialogue that is not duplicated in the info tab
  2. You can tag a part of the info tab and have that text duplicated in the widget tooltip
  3. There is a checkbox to choose which option to use and you can do either

Personally, I think I want to have the ability to put a short description in the widget itself that might be different from what is in the info tab, and I could also see myself wantint to re-use stuff from the info tab.

8

Hi all. This is a very good idea. I would also consider making it international, by making a primitive that defines these texts as an array, so that you can insert other languages as well. Sharona

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