Subject: Pet Peeves #2 - Focus on Transient Close

From: Bob Woodside <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1999 21:21:36 -0400

Back in May we had a long discussion about the proper window to
transfer focus to when a transient closes. A number of people felt that
the only proper thing to do was to transfer focus to the parent (always
be suspicious of a principle stated that way!) I expressed reservations.
As I recall the decision was "let's try it this way for a while and see
if it really bothers anyone; if so we can make a new option."

	It really bothers me. Let's make a new option.

	Here's the scenario I have. I use ClickToFocus, GrabFocus, and
GrabFocusTransient. My preferred editor is nedit (no religious
discussion about the One True Editor, please!) When I'm editing a file,
and wish to open a new one (which will open a new top level window), I
select File->Open, which pops up a transient file selection dialogue.
When I select the file I want, a new edit window appears and the
transient closes, but who gets the focus? The old window, which was the
parent of the now defunct transient. This is definitely not what any
normal user would want; it's not even what I would want.

	Now, the problem is that nedit creates the new window before destroying
the transient. You see the new window briefly flash its focused colors
before the transient disappears and the focus reverts to its parent. It
won't do to argue that this is a program bug. It's simply the way nedit
operates, and we should be able to handle it gracefully. I'm sure there
are other programs that do similar things.

	I am now sure that I want an option to have the focus revert to the
last-focused window instead of the parent, since, as I mentioned back in
May, there are other scenarios where reverting to the parent is
absolutely the wrong thing.

	Would anyone else like to cast a vote before I dig into this one?

Cheers,
Bob
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---

From: Dominik Vogt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 13:40:36 +0200

On Sun, Sep 19, 1999 at 09:21:36PM -0400, Bob Woodside wrote:
> won't do to argue that this is a program bug.

Perhaps, when the dreaded wm-spec v2 is finally ready, application
writers will honour it and use the the defined mechanisms to transfer
focus to such newly opened windows.  That won't help us much, however.

> It's simply the way nedit

I still can't believe anybody prefers ClickToFocus :-) Okay, no
religious discussion about focus policy either.

> 	Would anyone else like to cast a vote before I dig into this one?

That's the advantage of maintaining a window manager, you can
make it do anything you like :-) BTW, shouldn't we finally clean
up the GlobalOpts and do what has been announced for a long time:
make the focus GlobalOpts new styles? 

Bye

Dominik ^_^

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phone: 07031/14-4596, fax: 07031/14-3883, [email-masked]
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