[Ayatana] Focus follows pointer (Was: Re: Understanding the menu problem.)

[Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx>]

Truth be told, I never used focus "FFP" more than a few times out of
curiosity. I'd be interested why people turn it on and how it helps
them with their workflow.

In GNOME there are two relevant settings. One immediately focuses the
window beneath the pointer. Additionally you can make the window rise
after a given time interval. (See System Settings -> Windows).

To me the latter doesn't really make sense, raise on click will be
faster except when you set it to "0.0" in which case, especially on a
busy desktop it will get in your way.
Without the rise feature enabled you only get focus which doesn't help
you with mouse interaction if the desired  controls are behind another
window. I guess it could make sense for keyboard shortcuts but then
you'd have your hands on the keyboard and could use even faster
keyboard combos to activate the desired window.
On really busy workstations you probably don't have all windows
visible all the times so the new Unity spread view should increase the
efficiency even if ffp was completely removed.

I guess this leaves tiling layouts where all windows are visible all
the times. In this case all I can say: You really should use a realy
tiling WM and if you really care about speed and efficiency best thing
you could do is throw out your mouse and learn the keyboard controls.

Well that's how I see it. Please enlighten me!

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 6:14 PM, Jeremy Nickurak <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 09:29, GonzO <gonzo@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Is it?  I mean, how many people use "Focus follows pointer"?
>> I haven't seen anyone with that config in a dog's age.
>
> Speaking as a developer at a linux-centric branch of a major company,
> focus-follows-mouse is pretty much universal here. It doesn't matter much
> for users that typically only have one or two windows open, but when you
> have a busy workflow, it's a huge advantage.
>
> --
> Jeremy Nickurak -= Email/XMPP: -= jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx =-
>
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