Subject: FVWM: RE: wandering scope

From: Bob Woodside <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 1997 19:21:21 -0500 (EST)

On Fri, 31 Oct 1997, Guido Notari <[email-masked]> wrote:
>     [quotes from Usenet decrying windows that grab keyboard focus]
> I do type watching my screen, but I am of the very opinion of the first
> poster. The keyboard focus should *not* move.
> I don't know of any mean to obtain this result in fvwm2.  Even...
> SkipMapping...doesn't prevent [Netscape] from stealing keyboard focus.

        Would you settle for a small patch that will block the focus 
switch to a window that is not on the currently displayed desk/page? It'll
be fairly simple to do, I can't think of a good reason for not doing it
(rebuttals, anyone?), and I believe it will eliminate the most common
annoyance to the greatest number of people. I'll submit it in a few days. 
I don't think that more than this is practical in fvwm's current state 
(till after the Great Style Flag Rewrite).

        Now for the discussion part.... The original Usenet poster stated
the principle thus:

>  "Under no circumstances whatsoever should a windowing system allow
>  the keyboard focus to move other than as the result of explict user
>  action."

        While this sounds nice in principle - and I often have similar
feelings when confronted by the excesses of the in-your-face,
spoiled-child school of application programming - it's not so good in
actual practice. (I think the term "explicit user action" may be
open to a bit of fuzzy interpretation here.)

        I played around with the "ReallyStrictClickToFocus" idea on my
test system over the weekend, and the results were generally unsatisfying.
For keyboard oriented apps like editors and word processors, you usually
*do* want them to receive focus when they pop up a new window. With my 
"ReallyStrict" version, I still found myself typing into the wrong 
windows - just different wrong windows under different circumstances. 
Likewise, most of the time when you take an explicit action - like clicking
on "Find" in Netscape - that causes a transient to pop up, you tend to 
expect it to get focus without having to tell it so by clicking on it. I 
don't think anyone would be terribly happy if the "ReallyStrict" focus 
policy were forced on all applications.

        After the GSFR, I think it's reasonable to consider adding a
new style like "ClickToFocusAndIReallyMeanIt", which would allow you
selectively to apply a little more discipline to specific apps.

        Please realize, though, that neither my small patch nor the
proposed Strickly-Clicky mode would prevent ill-mannered apps from
explicitly grabbing focus themselves - but that's not what Netscape's
doing here.

        -Bob
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---

From: [email-masked] (Dale Smith)
Date: Tue, 04 Nov 1997 13:17:29 GMT

>policy were forced on all applications.

Could clicking "find" in netscrape be considered an "explicit user action"?

Dale

-- 
Dale P. Smith
[email-masked]
Cleveland Linux Users Group: http://cleveland.lug.net/