> Officially, it's called "Focus stealing prevention" and it's an option
> in most major window managers. I couldn't tell you where to find it, but
> it should be there. Well, I can find it in Kde, but only because that's
> what I use. I'd be happy to help you get set up on one of the heavy
> desktop environments if you like.
Focus stealing prevention is a specific work-around for some
applications.
Focus stealing is when an application written without FFM in mind steals
focus when a window is created. In the worst examples of this, it steals
focus from the current application and then locks focus within that
application. Some applications think this is a good idea to do with
their error dialogs.
Even when using traditional click-to-raise/click-to-focus focus-stealing
becomes a pain in the ass when some application you're not currently
using on Workspace 3 decides to raise an error dialog, stealing your
focus, automatically causing you to switch from Workspace 1, and now
you've not only hit the space bar, closing the error dialog, you're also
typing in a totally different application.
What Chad's talking about is generally called "Focus Follows Mouse".
There are a number of variations upon this theme. Some of them have
similar names but different meanings.
For instance, in KDE (4, at least), this is configured through the
"Window Behavior" settings panel, in the "Window Behavior" section
the first tab is called "Focus".
There's a number of options here including:
Focus stealing prevention level: (none, low, normal, high, extreme)
Policy: (Click to Focus, Focus Follows Mouse, Focus Under Mouse,
Focus Strictly Under Mouse)
(checkbox) Raise, with the following delay: XXX ms
(checkbox) Delay focus by: XXX ms
(checkbox) Click raises active window
I think what KDE calls "Focus Follows Mouse" is called "Sloppy Focus"
by FVWM. (It has been a long time since I used FVWM.) What FVWM calls
"Focus Follows Mouse" would be closer to "Focus Under Mouse", or "Focus
Strictly Under Mouse". -- I'm not sure how these are different in KDE.)
How is it different? The biggest difference is the behavior when the
mouse is on the Desktop. FVWM doesn't use the Desktop much, and when
it does, it doesn't really have things that can use the keyboard on
the desktop.
In traditional Desktop-styled systems, you can have files and folders on
the desktop, and a number of keyboard-initiated actions are available --
for instance F2 to rename. Now, in KDE if you're using "Focus Follows
Mouse", and you move your mouse to the Desktop, the focus doesn't change
from the last window it was in. If you were using "Focus Strictly Under
Mouse", as soon as you moved to the Desktop, the focus would be the
Desktop, and not your previous window.
I'm a fan of Focus Follows Mouse. To get the best bang-for-the-buck, I
make sure I can raise and lower windows without activating them. (In
KDE, this is the 'Titlebar Actions' and 'Window Actions' tabs in the
earlier mentioned 'Window Behavior' settings.)
I've taken to keeping Click Raises Active Window turned on. It makes
things a little less weird if someone else needs to access my computer,
and it also prevents me from being totally useless in other OSes. It
means I can flip between two apps and type in to them easily, and if
I need to do clicking, I see the whole window. With the way I use my
system, that's generally what I want.
Cheers,
--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
Fingerprint: 108C 089C EFA4 832C BF07 78C2 DE71 5433 8596 FA8E
No comments:
Post a Comment