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

["Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Ed Lin (edlin280@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> 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).

I don't use auto-rise, and I use sloppy focus - i.e. when the pointer goes
into a window it gets focus, but when it leaves a window it doesn't lose
it until it goes into another one.

My normal mode of working is a lot of terminals, and a web browser
and maybe a few IRC or the like, PDF viewers as well from time to time.
I make heavy use of virtual desktops (typically a 3x3 grid).

I've used sloppy or focus-follows for a long long time; I think
back to fvwm days or earlier on a Sun at Uni.

Most of my windows mostly don't overlap.  There are exceptions however;
I'll pull up another terminal occasionally to do something; or I'll
be working on one virtual desktop and set a window to all desktops
while I want to work on it side by side with something else.
Another case is I might be doing some calculations on the data in one
window, I might pop up a small terminal (say 80x5), force it always-on-top
and run bc in it (yeh, old school I know - but I can't find a graphical
calc that suits all the simple stuff I do and doesn't take more work).

> 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.

OK, but then you have to somehow designate windows to key bindings
and remember which is which; that's easy if you always have the same
layout, but not if your layout varies a lot; where as just flicking the
mouse to the left into the window that's on the left is easy - and
with sloppy you don't have to be accurate to do that; I'll also
sometimes leave a bit of space between windows to make that easier.

> 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.

Ah but that's why I use virtual desktops, so most windows are visible most
of the time in a given desktop.

> 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.

Yeuch tiling; feels like a straight jacket!

Dave
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