unity-design team mailing list archive

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05/31/2011 07:27 PM, Ed Lin 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.

I first got to know FFP when I used a computer lab at a university with 
Irix machines a few times. It didn't take long until I disabled it.

Later I had a kind of aha-moment, using Blender and realizing how nice 
the internal FFP is, though having almost no floating windows helps a 
great deal.

Nice, not so obvious aspects of FFP are:
- It eliminates the click-through question (does a click on a widget of 
an unfocused window just focus the window, or also count as click on the 
widget?)
- It's consistent with how mouse wheel events are handled.


> 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.

I do use immediate auto raise. It allows me to very quickly switch 
between overlapping windows with a rough gesture. It's especially handy 
with GIMP, where I often use an image window that overlaps much of 
palettes to both sides of the screen. So I get a large working area but 
also quick access to tools. More convenient than toggling palettes with 
Tab or toggling full-screen mode in phases where I need to access 
palettes often.

I do have issues with dialogs and small windows falling back behind 
larger ones sometimes, where I have to use Alt-Tabbing. An optimized 
window placement scheme and/or automatically presenting a window that is 
hidden behind another one as tab of that window could solve that.

FFP with auto raise are the optimal settings if you get someone else to 
try to demonstrate something on your machine ;)


> (...) if you really care about speed and efficiency best thing
> you could do is throw out your mouse and learn the keyboard controls.

You can fool yourself regarding the efficiency of keyboard shortcuts 
easily. You may have to think, recall shortcuts, which throws off your 
sense of time. So it depends on training effects and what the 
alternative means of interaction is, exactly.


--
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/