Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 7837
GNOME does not correctly handle Keyboard focus
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:53 EDT
I have recently installed RedHat 6.1. This was a fresh install right out of the box. I installed Gnome and for the first time am trying to use it. I find that when windows are popped up, keyboard focus does not follow with them to the new window, so I must click in the new window with the mouse before the window will accept my keystrokes. I have found this in at least two applications 1) Netscape - for instance I click to create a new mail message. I am used to just typing when I do this. But in Gnome, I must click into the composition window before my keystrokes go here. 2) Terminal - I click on the task-bar terminal icon. A new terminal window pops up. But until I click in it with the mouse, my keystrokes go elsewhere. This is annoying and dangerous. I can easily foresee a situation where I will screw up some document that I am editing because I am not typing where I expect to be typing. I've never seen a GUI that behaves this way. Not Windows, not KDE, not even FVWM.
You should be able to configure this with the window manager configurator in control-center.
Yes. Someone else suggested this and I've tried it and, while the "sloppy cursor focus" option is less annoying than than the "click to focus" option, neither resolves my essential point which is that when you invoke some program, whether from a panel icon, a menu item, or even a command-line, if that program is accessible by the keyboard, then that program should receive keyboard focus when it is activated. In other words, activating a GUI program should cause the normal assignment of keyboard focus by mouse position to be overridden by assigning keyboard focus to the window of the newly activated program. None of the Enlightenment options provide this functionality, even though every other GUI I have ever seen does, from Windows, to Macintosh, to KDE. This would appear to be a design decision rather than a bug, but to me it's probably enough to push me over the line and make me avoid GNOME/Enlightenment altogether.
OK, now I found the place. It's on the "behavior" tab. So now I learn that that instead of being "brain-damaged" as I originally thought, GNOME actually has the most flexible keyboard focus policies of any GUI I've seen.