GUI.tooltip not working in guiLayout ?

we don’t have GUILayout.tooltip so I assumed that GUI.tooltip would work in my custom inspector - WRONG: the tooltip appears near the upper right corder of the screen, probably ignoring most of the auto-layouting

is there another way to get tooltips which doesn’t involve area (I do everything with nested BeginVertical and BeginHorizontal)?

Most GUILayout functions can take a GUIContent object as a parameter. This object has a field you can use to supply a tooltip.