[openbox] Exceptions to focusing new windows

Dana Jansens dana at orodu.net
Sun Aug 18 16:35:21 EDT 2013


On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Xyne <xyne at archlinux.ca> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> When the option is set to focus new windows (<focus><focusNew>yes...), is
> there
> any way to make it conditional on the currently focused window? In my
> case, I
> have an always-on-top quake-like terminal that spans the bottom of the
> screen.
> Normally I want the new window to be focused, but if I am working in the
> terminal then I would prefer focus to remain there.
>

I don't have any good ideas for how to do this right now either.


>
> If this is not currently possible, would a feature request for a new
> "<application>" property have any chance, e.g.
> "<keepFocus>yes</keepFocus>"?
>

This would help, but I'm not sure it would cover all cases. Keep focus
when? Maybe you have some window you do want to take focus. Or maybe you
move the mouse out and you use mouse focus, should it keep focus? etc..

I've been trying to think what else we might do to solve this, what I came
up with at the moment is if we added more bindings to the rc.xml. We had a
branch with "hooks" on it to run actions when various events occured in the
WM, but it was really easy to cause infinite loops by causing an action
which triggered the hook again.. so it didn't go anywhere yet.

But..

If we had a "new window" hook, with the default action being "focus", then
you could replace that with an if action. It would make the <focusnew>
option a lot more general.

The only threat here would be an execute action that made another new
window, of course. But, sometimes on does want to shoot oneself in the foot.


>
> My current solution is to use the "<focus>" property for the terminal and
> quickly toggle it with a shortcut when I need to regain focus, but it is
> obviously inconvenient.
>
> Regards,
> Xyne
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