[openbox] sloppy focus "stealing"

Mikael Magnusson mikachu at gmail.com
Sat May 21 20:46:06 EDT 2011


On 22 May 2011 02:21, Ian Zimmerman <itz at buug.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 21 May 2011 23:51:21 +0200
> Mikael Magnusson <mikachu at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ian>  If you feel this way about it, maybe you shouldn't provide the
> Ian> option at all.  Otherwise you'll always have people like me
> Ian> complaining because you're not willing to accept patches to
> Ian> actually make it work.
>
> Mikael> Sorry, when did I say I didn't accept patches?
>
> You said "it's hard to imagine how such a thing could work", which I
> took to mean roughly "I will try hard to find something wrong with any
> patch to implement this."  Was I wrong?

Yeah, what I meant was "it's hard to imagine how such a thing could
work". If such a patch falls over when windows aren't raised or can't
be raised, that is of course a problem. When I said "crazy" I only
meant that I personally would never want to use this mode, bad choice
of words perhaps ;).

> On a more substantive note perhaps, it is true that focus-follows-mouse
> is very different from click-to-focus.  So different that changing a few
> code paths here and there depending on the flag is probably not enough
> to really make it work.

To avoid confusion, let's not call strict mouse focus
"focus-follows-mouse". Focus already follows mouse and it works
perfectly fine. The mouse just doesn't follow focus. I'm not out to
"get" anyone here, in case you got that impression, I just see the
problems I mentioned earlier. If you have a solution for those, I
would be happy to hear :).

If you and others who like strict focus still consider warping the
pointer into the wrong window better than not warping it at all, we
could consider adding that mode I suppose. (It just feels wrong to
me). Have you tried using openbox with the underMouse option off
though? Then when you're using the mouse, windows you enter will get
focused, and when you're using the keyboard, windows you alt-tab to
will be focused and the mouse pointer doesn't have to care one way or
the other.

I'm not sure if this should be an option or an action, possibly both
could be available. With the option, we could warp the cursor
regardless of how the window got focused, ie you clicked on its
taskbar button or it simply focused itself. With the action you can
explicitly tell alt-tab to focus a window, raise it, and move the
cursor to it. Then it wouldn't warp from other focus changes.
Obviously we would need to take care to not warp the cursor when the
focus change originated from an enter event in the option scenario.

-- 
Mikael Magnusson


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