RFE: Never, ever steal focus.

[Owen Taylor]

On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 22:12 +0100, Till Maas wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 03:32:26PM -0500, Peter Jones wrote:
> > On 01/06/2010 03:21 PM, Till Maas wrote:
> >
> >> How about making the gnome-panel give away its focus to the newly
> >> created window? Within the gnome-panel, it should be pretty obvious
> >> which actions should give away the focus and which should not. I do not
> >> know, how easy to implement it is, though.
> >
> > That's pretty difficult for a launcher - how does the panel know that
> > the launcher is going to create a window vs which is not?  And how does
> > it know what window it is?  If you click on the firefox launcher, it
> > runs a shell script.  That script (may) eventually run an X
> > application, but it in itself isn't one.  What's the launcher telling
> > the wm in that case under your proposed model?
> 
> It could tell the WM, if a new window opens within the next second,
> focus it. I guess this should work in many cases. But in a better world,
> the launcher could maybe tell the WM if this process or a child of it
> creates a new window, then give the focus to it.
> Btw. I do not like it in general if a newly started application does not
> immediately open a new window and is ready to be used, but instead takes
> several seconds to startup and then take away focus if I am already
> doing something else then to wait for it. This is also why I propose a
> timeout for the focus giveaway.

We already have ways of distinguishing these cases, and don't need to
invent new mechanisms.

- Owen