Show hover hints only when Alt (or another modifier) is pressed

[eugenesvk]

If you select text with a mouse and then let the cursor "rest" somewhere away from the selected text not to obscure it, there is a high chance that you'd randomly move it to a valid identifier or something and get a big obscuring popup with doc info.
Crude ways to avoid it is to either disable popup doc hints completely or be conscious of where you move your mouse cursor

A better way would be to add a barrier to activation, for example, only showing doc hints when a convenient modifier like Alt is being held

[rchl]

ST API currently has no way of triggering different behavior based on modifier keys - sublimehq/sublime_text#6464

That said, the popup can get quite large even without documentation section so is this really a documentation-specific problem?

[eugenesvk]

Not exclusively a doc info, just exacerbated, the random popup is the annoyance, but when it's big, it's a bigger one as it's harder to ignore

Is ST capable of detecting gestures? For example, instead of simple hover you could track a "move mouse left and right a short distance", though that's more complicated.

Are plugins allowed to, for example, install keyboard hooks/taps (on Windows and equivalent on other OSes) to track keyboard state themselves?

Or maybe you'd have to use an external keyboard binding tool to signal to the plugin when modifier is held, I was using this mechanism to do text mode switch on key held vs tapped