On 11/10/05, Brandon Kuczenski <b@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, 10 Nov 2005, Elijah Newren wrote: > > It's the designated no-focus-window (a window created by Metacity that > > the user never sees but is around to ensure that global keybindings > > work...). That window can also get focused when certain bugs (e.g. > > X11's utterly stupid RevertTo behavior) are worked around. > > Okay, so a window that doesn't exist and should never be seen by the user > has focus, but the desktop, which fills 100% of the visible screen space, > is an 'utterly stupid' choice for focus? > > That seems strange to me. You totally misunderstood what I was saying. ;-) See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125492. X11's RevertTo behavior means X will often make no window have focus (not even an unseen offscreen window), which results in the keyboard being totally nonfunctional for X until the user clicks on some window. It's a bug in the X protocol. We have to attempt to figure out when that has happened and manually fix it up. I brought it up just to try to help explain why the no_focus_window exists, not to explain why we don't focus the desktop when all "normal" windows are closed. > Perhaps it would help if we explained our metaphors. Here's mine: a > desktop is the surface on top of which all things with which I am working > lie. The mouse pointer is used to point to the thing I am interested in > (I am a mouse-focus user as well, Elijah). mouse focus or sloppy focus? Sorry to have to ask, but many are unaware of the difference and claim mouse when they mean sloppy. I suspect you really do mean mouse from something else you said, but I'd like to be sure. I'll postpone responding to most of the rest of what you wrote until I know the answer to that so that I can respond correctly. > As far as I know, not being a > programmer but very much being an end-user, the only things that can lie > upon the desktop, and the only things that can be focused on, are windows. > When there are no windows, the mouse is over the desktop; hence, > mouse-focus suggests [to me] the desktop should have focus. > > That makes sense to me. Your earlier post seemed to be a part of a > conversation to which I am not privy. Perhaps in context it would make > sense, but I must say I could not follow it. No, it wasn't part of an outside conversation, I just must suck at properly explaining things. ;-) Basically, I was just trying to say that making one little change in focus policy often causes inconsistencies elsewhere unless you have a good overall view of how things should work and your change is made to be consistent with that. There are lots of bugs in bugzilla that I think showed that. Anyway, I went into some details about how your proposed change could make things inconsistent and asked for the correct behaviors so that I could try to get an understanding of what the overall picture is. I still need the answers to those questions, but it may help if you read metacity/docs/how-to-get-focus-right.txt (also available online at http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/metacity/doc/how-to-get-focus-right.txt?view=markup) and explain to me which parts of the policy you think should be tweaked, how they should be tweaked, and why. > There is one exception: the MRU list. To me, it makes sense (and would, > in this context, be a material improvement over the status quo) for the > desktop to be part of the list of most-recently-used windows. I actually > use the desktop to store files that I'm working with but have not > categorized in directories yet; being able to bring it to focus by cycling > through the active windows is appealing. As for your question about > focusing docks, it seems like the mouse-focus metaphor already answers > that question: if the mouse is over it, it should have focus. > > Please do not take offense at these responses -- as both an end user and > an advocate of collaborative software development, I find the discourse > quite compelling. Cheers, Elijah _______________________________________________ gnome-list mailing list gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list
