[openbox] focus follows mouse and keybinding raise/lower window

Clay Barnes clay.barnes at gmail.com
Tue May 9 02:16:08 EDT 2006


On 08:03 Tue 09 May     , Mikael Magnusson wrote:
> On Mon, 8 May 2006, Clay Barnes wrote:
> 
> >On 07:07 Tue 09 May     , Mikael Magnusson wrote:
> >>On Mon, 8 May 2006, Emile Snyder wrote:
> >>
> >>>Hi,
> >>>
> >>>From the FAQ:
> >>>
> >>>Q: When I lower, raise or move windows with a keybinding, focus doesn't
> >>>follow the mouse!
> >>>A: This is a feature, how large is the chance that the mouse
> >>>accidentally enters a window you want to focus when you move or
> >>>lower/raise something?
> >>>
> >>>Uhh, for me, 99% because I'm always sending windows to the back of the
> >>>stack to *get at what's behind them*.  I've switched to openbox recently
> >>>because blackbox makes my gnome panel based desktop take forever to
> >>>start up (presumably because it's waiting for a session type connection
> >>>to time out since blackbox doesn't support sessions?).  The focus issue
> >>>is a deal killer to me.
> >>>
> >>>Can one of the openbox hackers point me quickly to which source file I
> >>>should poke around in to change this behavior?
> >>
> >>If you bind lower to a mouse button, which is reasonable if you want focus
> >>to change based on the mouse pointer's position, focus will in fact change
> >>to the window that the mouse pointer is over after your window has
> >>lowered. If you are working only with the keyboard, how do you make sure
> >>the mouse pointer is where you want, do you move it first and then press a
> >>keyboard binding??? Why not use Next/PreviousWindow?
> >Strict ordering regardless of order of focus (including other windows
> >not in the "stack") is a barrier to the next/prev. window idea.
> >
> >And with the mouse, it's possible Emile doesn't have a button to spare.
> >
> >I'm not saying it should be a mainline change, but I do see why an
> >individual change would be warrented.
> 
> Something still seems wrong to me about using the keyboard to lower a 
> window because you "do not use the mouse much" and still depend on the 
> location of the mouse pointer to determine focus. Maybe you want to use 
> virtual desktops?
That's what I do, but there are advantages (they are admittedly small,
though) to having two dimensions of stacks, one across desktops and one
within.  Sure you need *lots* of apps, or a need for strong grouping
to require such a paradigm, but, hey, to each is own, right?
> That way you know exactly where every window is and can 
> have direct keybinds to them.
> 
> --
> Mikael Magnusson




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