Hi ianrb,
You should get a tooltip appear when you hover the mouse over any of the tools down the left hand side. You can fully customise the toolbar, so anything thats stack can have a single icon on the Tools panel and you'd be able to hover directly over it with the mouse and get the tooltip. Just click View>Customise Tools and you can drag the icons onto the bar.
We can't enable names on the tools and that would make for a good Feature Request. I can only guess it's not an option at the moment because of the Tooltips and it presents a slightly cleaner UI, however i can also see the benefit of being able to enable the names for people getting used to Affinity and photo editing in general.
Hope thats of some help
