SDL3 Introduces The Concept Of Child Popup Windows

Development work on SDL3 continues at full-speed for the next version of this hardware/software abstraction library that is commonly used by cross-platform games. The newest feature merged is support for child pop-up windows.

This week a commit landed for SDL3 introducing the child pop-up window concept, which in this context is described as:

Add the CreatePopupWindow function to allow the creation of child tooltip and menu popup windows. Popup windows must be created as either a tooltip or popup menu and cannot be minimized, maximized, made fullscreen, or grab the mouse.

Child popup windows are tracked and will be recursively hidden, shown, or destroyed in tandem with the parent window.

This pop-up window support was in turn wired up across the Wayland, X11, video, Cocoa, and Win32 back-ends.

The effort stems from this feature request to support cross-platform tooltips within SDL applications. Existing SDL2 tooltip functionality only worked on X11 and Wayland - more details via this pull for interested game/app developers.