GNOME and the way forward [LWN.net]

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 15:29 UTC (Thu) by newren (subscriber, #5160)
In reply to: GNOME and the way forward by sfeam
Parent article: GNOME and the way forward

Hehe, your explanation of your requested behavior doesn't quite match:

I'm of the school that says nothing should ever steal the focus from a window I am typing in. Ditto for windows I am interacting with via mouse clicks.

Translates as "don't transfer focus to a new window if I'm busy with another window (implying that a transfer of focus is okay if you're not busy with another window)". Note that Metacity does this.

Basically I *never* want a new window or new app to steal focus.

Translates as (rather obviously) "don't transfer focus to a new window regardless of whether I'm busy with another window". Metacity has no option for this, currently.

A "strict" mouse focus has been proposed and in fact patched in by RHEL, Debian, and Ubuntu so it may well end up in Metacity itself. But the patch (in bug 152004) that proposed it was kind of muddied by the fact that it uses lots and lots of kludges to workaround dozens of other bugs that no longer exist so it was hard to differentiate between a real request and just a workaround for old bugs...

(Log in to post comments)

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 18:58 UTC (Thu) by loening (guest, #174) [Link]

I'm also of the school that says nothing should ever steal the focus from a window that I'm typing in. But by "typing", I mean that I have been typing in that window, not that I necessarily have managed to type anything else between the time a new app has been started and the 0.2s it takes to popup a window on the screen.

For the gnome-terminal example, if I type "gnome-terminal &" in the terminal window, I don't want the new terminal to grab the focus, even through the new window (at least on my 2GHz box) pops up faster then I can type another key.

After reading through this very insightful thread, I now understand how the current behavior has been arrived upon in GNOME. But I would personally love an option to enable "new window doesn't steal focus unless it pops up under the cursor" behavior.

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 19:20 UTC (Thu) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link]

So in other words we just have to place new windows where the mouse currently is and then you're fine with the new window taking focus?

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 19:59 UTC (Thu) by loening (guest, #174) [Link]

I assume you're joking, but humor often doesn't translate well into text.

So just so we're clear. New windows should not take focus if another window has the focus, unless the new window has to pop up over the current window because there's no other spot for it to pop up.

Actual, after reading some of the new posts, an even better policy might be this: New window should not take focus if another window has the focus, and a new window should not pop-up over a window that has the focus. If the new window has to use screen real-estate that the focused window has, it should pop-under the focused window.

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 20:51 UTC (Thu) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link]

I assume you're joking, but humor often doesn't translate well into text.

Actually, no I wasn't. You'd be really surprised what you hear people request when you work on developing a window manager. I really was just trying to get you to clarify. (thanks for doing so).