GNOME and the way forward

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 22:29 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: GNOME and the way forward by newren
Parent article: GNOME and the way forward

Thanks for your responses, it's been nice to have someone who's at least attempting to understand the problem looking at this.

Also, you seem to have ignored placement.

Placement is simple. If there's room on the current desktop, place it there, if there isn't it puts an outline of the window on the screen and I place it with the mouse. Since I arrange for the desktop to be free whenever I start an app the placement is never that hard. I know exactly how long Galeon takes to startup and can jump to the desktop at the right time.

This is only for top-level windows, for subwindows they just popup and like you say, they get focus if and only if I have the mouse there. If it's one of those dialogs that keeps popping up and I need to press no, I can place my mouse at the right place to meet it. If I don't care I'll keep typing in the window behind it and deal with the box when I want to. I don't know how FVWM does it, but it does work well. This does mean that subwindows, whenever possible, should popup in the same place, irrespective of where the mouse is.

What about apps that try to transfer focus from one of their already onscreen windows to another already onscreen window [...] --should such requests just be summarily denied because the user hasn't moved the mouse?

In short, yes. I control the focus, not the application. The app may ofcourse respectfully request the focus be moved and it can just as respectfully be ignored.

As to your questions about the task-bar and alt-tab, I checked and it warps the mouse to the desktop and location so as to make the app have focus. But I never use those things. Like I said I have a 4x4 virtual desktop and my browser / mail client / etc have fixed desktops so with the keyboard I can just jump straight to the app I want. Alt-tab and task-bars tend to get the apps in a random order (that keeps changing) so I can't use them to get to an app in a deterministic way. One app per desktop remember...

The input focus stealing, yes, I've seen that with Netscape 4.x if an app opened just as you were browsing the menu. Nasty stuff. As someone pointed out, why do menus need to steal focus when they don't actually need to. Everything works fine without. I worked out ways to break that focus. If an app I used did that a lot I wouldn't use it...

Anyway, I'm one of those people who dislikes taskbars and desktop icons and I'll probably keep using FVWM no matter how good you make GNOME. I think overall you're doing a good job, I just hope that if I'm ever required to use GNOME somewhere, I'll be able to set it up with strict mouse focus.

Have a nice day,

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