RFE: Never, ever steal focus.

[Peter Hutterer]

On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 09:29:55AM +0100, Tomas Mraz wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 22:43 -0500, Gregory Maxwell wrote: 
> > On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Adam Jackson <ajax at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 11:23 -0600, Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> > >> There is no case where I want a new window or popup to take focus.  Makes
> > >> for an easy algorithm.  (hitting r in mutt is not a problem :)
> > >
> > > There is no case where _you_ want this, sure.
> > 
> > Some people what that.
> > Many other people want the focus change to happen in a _few_ limited
> > cases where it makes sense.
> > 
> > Current behaviour fails to accurately predict those cases (no doubt
> > because, in part, the limited acceptable cases differ from person to
> > person), and so you get unexpected focus theft. This is bad for
> > everyone.
> 
> The problem is that the "automatic focus change only when intended by
> user" will never be done 100% correctly. This is just impossible to do. 
> 
> So the actual better user experience case would be to always require the
> user to press some (easy) key combination to transfer the focus from the
> currently focused window. The user would quickly learn it.

Having to click into every window when it opens (especially if it
was intentional) can become quite tiring - I had to do this while working on
MPX when the proof-of-concept WM didn't have any auto-focus capabilities. It
is predictable, but _really_ annoying.

Anyway, it's a simple cost/benefit question. Does the cost of the unintended
focus changes outweigh the cost of clicking into new windows for your
workflow? If so, how about the person next to you? How about your partner,
uncle, grandma, neighbour's son, boss?

> So the actual better user experience case [...]

"better user experience" is really hard to quantify. TWM has a predictable
interface for displaying new windows and could thus be labelled as "better
user experience" based on this premise. No other popular window manager uses
the same approach though. It all depends on your definition of "better",
"user" and "experience".

Cheers,
  Peter