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

[Emile Snyder]

On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 07:07 +0200, Mikael Magnusson wrote:
> On Mon, 8 May 2006, Emile Snyder wrote:
> > 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?

While I am happy to debate the finer points of focus/keybinding/usage
patterns I just want to re-iterate first that I would greatly appreciate
any pointers people have to the right point to make this change in the
codebase.  I'm not arguing about whether it should go in the official
release or not, I just want to make a build of the binary that does what
I want.  Also, I want to apologize for jumping straight into whiny user
mode; I appreciate all the work that the openbox hackers have put into
the project and am impressed with the quality of the software in
general.  I just have strong and finicky needs for my WM user
interface ;)

As to usage: I vastly prefer point to focus over click to focus, and
like to avoid using the mouse when it is unnecessary. I often work with
a single large window (web browser, expanded xterm, or remote desktop
session for example) along with a basically complete tiling of xterms in
a given desktop.  I'll have something going on in the terminals, want to
switch to the full screen app (and possibly do some stuff) then send it
back to the back of the stack so that I can see all the xterms again.
With current openbox, I can send the xterm I'm currently working in to
the back easily with the keybinding, but that just exposes an xterm
sized piece of the large window I want to see.  If I want to bring the
exposed full size window to the front I have to go shift focus with the
mouse to some other xterm, then back to the large window, then go back
to the keyboard to raise the now focused window.

I've tried Next/PreviousWindow bindings in the past, but find them
needlessly confusing and unwieldy with more than, say, 3 windows in the
desktop.

Thanks to all the openbox hackers out there,
-emile

> > Thanks,
> > -Emile Snyder
> >
> >
> 
> --
> Mikael Magnusson
> 
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