On 03/26/2011 11:00 PM, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
however the problem I've run into is that since I use sloppy focus it's quite hard sometimes to get the menus to the app you want - I have to carefully run my mouse up through a gap between other windows until I get to the panel - otherwise it'll switch to the menu for the other app.
Global menu and any other but the click-to-focus model are conceptually incompatible.
A delay could make it easy enough to get to the menu, but would annoy in any other case, destroying much of the point of sloppy/follows-mouse focus.
Pointer movement analysis would be a huge overhead and make it hard for the user to build a mental model of what's going on.
Now, you could still use the menu via keyboard navigation, but all in all, I would suggest that the focus models other than click-to-focus should be dropped from Unity, as long as the global menu concept stays.
I say that as a long-time focus-follows-mouse and immediate auto-raise user. To me personally any other mode feels idiotically slow and laborious, it's lovely to not have to wonder about click-through* behavior, but some issues arise with bad window placement and dialogs that fall back behind their parents. To have a chance to bring the benefits of this focus model to a wider audience, the entire window management behavior would have to be designed around it.
*Click-through: does a click over a widget of an unfocused window only focus the window, or will it count as click on the widget, too?
-- Thorsten Wilms thorwil's design for free software: http://thorwil.wordpress.com/