Tooltips Improved

Makes tooltips readable, however long they get. Client-side only, with no dependencies, so Fabric API isn't needed.

Features

Folded armor trims. Vanilla spends three lines on an armor trim:

Upgrade:
 Sentry Armor Trim
 Iron Material

This shows Sentry Armor Trim (Iron) instead: the pattern in gray, the material in its own colour. Hold Shift to see the full vanilla lines. Materials from other mods keep their full name unless a lang key tooltipsimproved.<their trim_material key> gives a short one (see assets/tooltipsimproved/lang/en_us.json).

Text wrapping. Long lines are broken at word boundaries, keeping their colours, so the tooltip fits in the space beside the cursor instead of stretching across the screen. Other modes wrap only what wouldn't fit on the screen at all, to half the screen, or to a fixed width. Vanilla's narrow 170 pixel wrap on button tooltips can be turned off so those follow the same setting.

Smarter placement. Vanilla puts a tooltip beside the cursor. When it fits on neither side, vanilla draws it over the cursor and hides what you're pointing at. Tooltips Improved instead centers it above or below the cursor, or moves it to the nearest screen corner that leaves the cursor clear. A tooltip taller than the screen shows its top rather than its bottom. Button tooltips can sit centered above or below their button.

Scrolling. Tooltips that still don't fit can be moved, including past the screen edges:

Input	Moves the tooltip
Mouse wheel	Up / down
Left Alt + mouse wheel, or a side wheel	Left / right
Page Up / Page Down	Up / down, while held
Left Alt + Page Up / Page Down	Left / right, while held
Movement keys, WASD by default (off by default)	Any direction

The wheel only moves a tooltip along a direction it doesn't fit in, and otherwise keeps scrolling the screen as usual. Keys are rebindable under Controls → Inventory, to keys or mouse buttons, and there's an unbound "Reset Tooltip Position" key. The tooltip glides into place, starts back in place when you hover something else, and resets when its screen closes. Sideways movement uses Left Alt rather than Tooltip Scroll's Shift, because Shift expands tooltips here (and Ctrl is Sprint).

Exact durability. Damaged items show Durability: 312 / 1561, as a fraction, a percentage or both, with the numbers colored like the durability bar. It stays out of the way when F3+H already shows vanilla's line, and on unbreakable items.

Equipment comparison. Armor, weapons and tools show how their stats differ from what you have equipped, under a Compared to equipped: Iron Sword line: +1 Attack Damage in green, -0.4 Attack Speed in red. Amounts are the real change, so a sword against an empty hand shows +5 Attack Damage and -2.4 Attack Speed. Stats an item hides aren't compared, and enchantments aren't compared yet.

Content previews. Written books show the start of their first page, filled maps their image (or "Map not loaded" if the server hasn't sent it), banners and shields their pattern, and firework stars and rockets icons for each explosion's shape, colors and fade colors.

Looks. The background can be made see-through so it covers less of the inventory, and the extra gap under the first line can be removed.

Config

Every option has an in-game settings screen. On Fabric, open it from Mod Menu (optional) by selecting Tooltips Improved and clicking the settings button. On NeoForge and Forge, use the Config button in the Mods list. Changes apply immediately and are saved to config/tooltipsimproved.json, which can also be edited by hand.

Option	Default
foldTrims	true	Show armor trims on one line
durability.enabled	true	Show the durability line
durability.showWhen	WHEN_DAMAGED	ALWAYS, WHEN_DAMAGED, or SHIFT_HELD
durability.format	FRACTION	FRACTION, PERCENT, or BOTH
durability.colorByRemaining	true	Color the numbers like the durability bar
comparison.enabled	true	Compare armor, weapons and tools to what's equipped
comparison.showWhen	ALWAYS	ALWAYS or SHIFT_HELD
comparison.hideIdentical	true	Show nothing when every stat matches
previews.books	true	Preview a written book's first page
previews.bookLines	6	Lines of the page to show, 1 to 14
previews.maps	true	Preview a filled map
previews.mapSize	64	Map width and height in pixels, 32 to 256
previews.banners	true	Preview a banner's or shield's pattern
previews.fireworks	true	Show icons for a firework's explosions
previews.showWhen	ALWAYS	ALWAYS or SHIFT_HELD
wrap	CURSOR	OFF, CURSOR (fit beside the cursor), SCREEN (only what wouldn't fit on the screen at all), HALF_SCREEN, or FIXED
wrapWidth	200	Width in pixels for FIXED
unwrapButtonTooltips	false	Skip vanilla's 170 pixel wrap on button tooltips
placement	CENTER_WHEN_CRAMPED	For tooltips that don't fit beside the cursor: VANILLA, CENTER_WHEN_CRAMPED, CORNER_WHEN_CRAMPED, or CORNER (always a corner)
placeAllTooltips	false	Apply placement to every tooltip, not just ones following the cursor
topFirst	true	Show the top of a tooltip taller than the screen
buttonTooltipsBesideButton	false	Center button tooltips above or below the button
backgroundOpacity	1.0	0 to 1; text stays opaque
removeFirstLineGap	false	Drop the gap under the first line
scrollWheel	true	Move tooltips with the mouse wheel
movementKeys	false	Also move tooltips with your movement keys; ignored while typing
resetWhenHidden	true	Put a tooltip back in place once it's hidden
invertHorizontal / invertVertical	false	Flip the wheel direction
wheelStep	10	Pixels per wheel notch
keySpeed	300	Pixels per second while a key is held
smoothness	0.25	Share of the distance covered per frame at 60 FPS; 0.05 glides, 1 is instant

Credits

The feature set is inspired by Better Trim Tooltips, Tooltip Scroll and Adaptive Tooltips. The implementation is written from scratch for one codebase across loaders and versions.

Targets

Minecraft	Fabric	NeoForge	Forge
1.21.1	✔	✔	✔
1.21.11	✔	✔	✔
26.2	✔	✔	✔
26.3	✔	✔	✔

Built with Stonecutter from one source tree. Edit settings.gradle.kts to add or drop versions, and stonecutter.properties.toml for per-version dependency numbers.

Working with it

• Switch the active version/loader with the Stonecutter Gradle tasks (Set active project to …) or by changing stonecutter active in stonecutter.gradle.kts. This rewrites the source tree for that target, so switch back to the VCS version (26.3-fabric) before committing.
• Version-specific code uses Stonecutter comments, e.g. //? if fabric { or //? if >=1.21.5 {.
• Build one target: ./gradlew :26.3-fabric:build. Run buildAndCollect on a target to copy its jars into build/libs/<mod version>/.
• Forge targets only exist with -Pforge, e.g. ./gradlew -Pforge :26.3-forge:build, because ForgeGradle's setup is slow on a fresh cache.
• runClient -Pmodmenu (Fabric) adds Mod Menu and Fabric API to the dev game, to try the settings screen from Mod Menu.
• runClient -Pselftest starts the game, runs the in-game checks in SelfTest on the title screen, logs PASS/FAIL per check, and quits.

Code map

Every tooltip goes through one vanilla method, hooked in mixin/TooltipRenderMixin. In order:

1. TooltipWrap breaks text lines that are too wide.
2. TooltipPlacement wraps vanilla's positioner to apply the placement rules, then keeps the top of tall tooltips in view.
3. TooltipScroll moves the result by the scroll offset.

Other pieces:

• Added tooltip lines: mixin/ItemStackMixin calls TooltipExtras, which adds TooltipDurability and TooltipComparison. TooltipComparison.deltas is the pure stat calculation.
• Previews: TooltipPreviews holds a data record and renderer per type, PreviewCanvas holds the drawing that changes between versions, and mixin/ItemStackMixin and mixin/ClientTooltipComponentMixin connect them to vanilla's tooltip images. These use mixins rather than loader events so Fabric API stays unneeded.
• Trim folding: TooltipsImproved.trimLine and mixin/ArmorTrimMixin.
• Background opacity: TooltipBackground and mixin/TooltipBackgroundMixin.
• Button tooltips: mixin/WidgetTooltipHolderMixin and mixin/TooltipMixin.
• Keybinds: added to the vanilla list by mixin/OptionsMixin, so no loader keybind API is needed.
• Settings screen: TooltipsImprovedScreen, built from vanilla's options widgets. It's hooked into Mod Menu by TooltipsImprovedModMenu and into the NeoForge and Forge mod lists by TooltipsImprovedNeoForge and TooltipsImprovedForge.

Hooks use plain Mixin features, except the background hook before 1.21.6, which uses MixinExtras' @WrapMethod on Fabric and NeoForge (both ship MixinExtras). Forge 1.21.1 doesn't ship it, so that hook uses @Inject there.

Stonecutter guide: https://stonecutter.kikugie.dev/wiki/start/