Bug 51492

Summary:	RFE: smarter window focus handling.
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Public Beta	Reporter:	Ed McKenzie <eem12>
Component:	sawfish	Assignee:	Havoc Pennington <hp>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	roswell	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2001-08-13 16:26:04 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Ed McKenzie 2001-08-10 22:39:35 UTC

Sawfish on RH should be set up by default so that it's possible to work
uninterrupted by windows stealing focus, whether they be new windows or
existing windows raised by misbehaved applications (e.g. Mozilla < 0.9.3.)
 If the top window has focus, new windows and dialogs should appear second
in Z-order and next in tab order, but they should _never_ steal focus. 
(Password entry is good enough reason IMNSHO to never steal window focus.)
 There might be some other means to signal something important happening --
title bars flashing active/inactive?  Who knows.

Win2K's interface is a good model for how this should work.

[IMHO the current default behavior is a serious bug, but I've labeled this
an RFE since I'm sure others will disagree.  I couldn't find any
combination of options that would produce the behavior I'm asking for ...]

Comment 1 Havoc Pennington 2001-08-13 13:49:18 UTC

Does win2k work as you described?

This is most likely a bug for upstream, I'll forward it there.

Comment 2 Ed McKenzie 2001-08-13 14:17:45 UTC

Windows 2000 works as described.  New windows only take focus if no 
other window already has focus, and alerts (dialogs, etc.) are signaled by 
flashing the window titlebar and its button in the task list.

I don't know if explicit attempts to steal window focus are allowed, but I 
haven't ever seen it happen personally.  It'd be great if stealing window 
focus were disallowed altogether, but I might be somewhat jaded from my 
Mozilla experience.

This would involve some panel work to get alert notification working in the 
taskbar.

Comment 3 Havoc Pennington 2001-08-13 16:25:59 UTC

If an application moves focus, sadly there is nothing we can do to prevent that
(other than fixing the app). There's no way to globally intercept focus moves.

But for the most part the behavior you describe could be implemented.
This is something that we'd normally do upstream though, not in Red Hat
patches.So I'll probably move this bug upstream when I get a chance.

Comment 4 Havoc Pennington 2002-03-01 15:15:34 UTC

See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73118