Show details upon mouseover

[jidanni]

In gpxsee, when I move the pointer over a KML line, a balloon with its name etc. appears. That would be nice in viking, where even clicking on a line doesn't show any details.

[rnorris]

Unfortunately due to way Viking currently works by using basic low level drawing functions, there is no facility as far as I'm aware, that enables an efficient way to translate between the pointer position and geo-data information.

I think more modern drawing stack operations use 'Scene Graph' techniques, such that there is more correlation between what is drawn and what caused it to be drawn.

It was hard enough to convert Viking from GTK2 to GTK3 (which required a level redoing the drawing capability) - although back when with Covid-19 lockdowns - I at least had more spare time to dedicate to doing that conversion.

Thus as a trade off, the look up between pointer position any geo-data is only performed on primary clicks (as it searches through all trackpoints and waypoints in the visible area - i.e. not the lines). ATM when a selection is found it will also highlight the layer in the left hand panel and update the statusbar at the bottom. However of course, these are not so obvious and/or one may have turned them off.

So it may be more practical to at least also display a pop-up on the viewport on this selection.

Enabling a search to work on matching lines would presumably require much more maths calculations, of which I don't know of any algorithms and nor even a slow brute force method. Or some alternative of reducing the number of trackpoints drawn into a simplified polyline instead of literally drawing every trackpoint. But then that would probably require other refactoring to maintain all of current Viking's features, so one would need to be sufficiently motivated to do this. Using other drawing APIs may offer such features and/or other benefits. But again, one needs to spend a lot of time working out how to use them and how to integrate/maintain with the existing code.