Show hostname in Navigation panel mouse-over when description is empty

Hello,

Thank you for the request. I think this could be a nice improvement. I've opened an internal ticket for this.

Regards,

In the Navigation panel, when hovering over an entry, RDM currently displays the entry description. When the description is empty, it displays the entry name itself. However, the entry name is already visible in the Navigation panel, so displaying it again in the mouse-over provides no additional information.

I think it would be more useful to display the hostname as a fallback when no description is configured. This would be particularly helpful when the hostname of an entry is changed frequently, as it would allow users to quickly verify which machine they are about to connect to without having to open the entry properties.

The current behavior of displaying the description when it is configured can remain unchanged; the hostname would simply be displayed when the description is empty.

thanks!

@dns2811
I agree that using the hostname as the fallback would be more useful than repeating the entry name. Especially with remote connections, being able to confirm the actual hostname directly from the navigation panel could prevent accidental connections to the wrong machine. Keeping the existing description behavior and only using the hostname when the description is empty seems like a simple and practical improvement.

Hello,

I'm working on this small improvement for the next major version of RDM. For clarity I think always showing the name, then the host, then the description (if these fields are filled out of course) would be the clearest. It would give a result like this:

Let me know what you think.

Regards,

That sounds perfect to me. The mouse-over could sometimes partially cover the entry name, so I think the safest and clearest approach would be to always display the entry name as well.
Then showing the host and description in that order seems like the best solution.
Thanks!

do you think adding the “Name:” and “Host:” labels could be confusing or unnecessary, or would they make the information clearer at a glance?

I personally felt it unnecessary. It would look like this were we to prefix these two:

For now I'll make the change without the prefix but if we see it would be better if we showed the information in a more distinct way, we'll revisit this.
This change should be available with our 2026.3 major release. It probably will not be available in our beta version but it should make it into the full release.

Regards,

You're absolutely right - just as I feared, the labels make things less clear. Thank you so much!

Also, omitting prefixes is an advantage for entry types that don't have a host field, such as passwords, for example. For such fields, a fallback to other fields (e.g. Username) could be implemented or not.