[openbox] Issues with Openbox 3.4

[Dana Jansens]

On 6/10/07, Matt Manzel <mmanzel at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wasn't around for the pre-releases but a friend told me about the 3.4
> release and I was surprised to see so many changes! Looks good. While
> things were overall better, I have some growing pains:
>
>
> * ResizeRelative <left> and <right> always affect the <left> edge of the
> window frame. I double-checked my configuration and everything appears
> right. I thought I would check here before I post a bug report.

Yup, I just fixed that now, thanks.  You can use the attached patch if
you are building it from source, or wait for 3.4.2, which will include
the fix.

> * Focus Grabbing Issues
>
> ** Firefox (on Ubuntu)
> When I launch Firefox while another application has focus, Firefox opens
> in the background and blinks at me. I would prefer it comes to the front
> and takes the focus when it is opened.

I'm assuming you mean launch firefox, when it is already running, to
open a new window?

If you're just launching the first window, it will get focus unless
you are typing/doing stuff in another window while it is loading.

The reason windows after the first don't get focused when you run
Firefox again is that Firefox tells Openbox that they are being opened
by a very old event.  It's lying to us, but we don't have any way to
find that out..

This is what Openbox says about it:
FOCUS: Want to focus new window 0x182456a with time 35256063 (last
time 35268115)
FOCUS: Not focusing the window because the time is too old

As you can see, the timestamp it claims was used to launch the new
window is very old and completely irrelevant (probably the last time
that you did something in another Firefox window).

> ** Tilda (tilda.sf.net)
> Tilda is a drop-down terminal in similar style to the "~" console in
> several popular FPS games (Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc). When tilda is
> activated, it no longer takes the focus like it is supposed to.

Tilda has been broken and it hasn't gotten any better.  It actually
doesn't run for me now.  I'm not sure why.  It won't run in Xnest on
its own either.  So I can't comment on this, but I'm curious about
what it's doing wrong - no other programs have trouble taking focus.

> ** Parent and child windows
> Parent/child windows of the same application don't always behave as
> expected. For example, if you have the Gedit 'Find' (child) window open,
> when you cycle applications and then bring it to the front the Gedit
> parent window is not also brought to the font and may be hidden under
> other open windows. I think the two windows should remain next to each
> other in the z-order when changing focus.

This was a conscious decision, to not raise parents and children
together.  And when you don't raise them together, you can't move them
in the focus order, or focus ends up potentially going behind
everything leaving you with no idea where it went.  Maybe that's not a
good idea, I don't know.  It was just the least intrusive/assuming
thing to do, to leave the last focused window as what actually last
had focus.

>
> * XML Whitespace removal
> I am not sure if this is Openbox or OBConf but some application removed
> all the whitespace from my rc.xml file. I understand this can be a speed
> improvement, but I cannot easily manage the file when everything is a
> smooshed together. Does anyone know of an easy way to add back newlines
> to the file so I can tidy it up by hand?

As someone mentioned, ObConf (actually, libXML) does this when the XML
is mal-formed.

Dana