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Bug 76672 - Handle cases where windows should not raise on click (e.g. focus windows only on button release, DND, always on top, whatever)
Handle cases where windows should not raise on click (e.g. focus windows only...
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: metacity
Classification: Other
Component: general
unspecified
Other other
: Normal enhancement
: future
Assigned To: Metacity maintainers list
Metacity maintainers list
: 104433 104456 105906 156980 520807 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks: 80984 86108 155452
 
 
Reported: 2002-03-27 17:24 UTC by kz
Modified: 2020-11-07 12:35 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: Unversioned Enhancement



Description kz 2002-03-27 17:24:47 UTC
well, now metacity support 'click to focus' mode.
when I _press_ on a window, it focus and come to foreground *immediately*.
by definition, 'click' is 'press and release',
so metacity's behaviour is out of order.

Microsoft Windows platform seems to support the click by right definition.
so I can make drag-n-drop from background explorer to foreground winamp.
if I tried to from nautilus to xmms, nautilus comes to foreground as soon 
as pressed,
and I fail to find xmms which is in background now.

this issue may be gtk-inside problem. I have no sure.
If I was with my box.. but I'm away now. I wanna try to hack cvs, can't. :-
(
Comment 1 Havoc Pennington 2002-03-27 17:38:49 UTC
You're saying the focus should come on mouse button release, not 
mouse button press? that makes sense.
Comment 2 kz 2002-03-27 17:56:46 UTC
that's exactly what I mean. :)
Comment 3 Luis Villa 2002-05-31 12:43:15 UTC
Enhancement, but this would solve most cases of bug 80984 [for the
record.]
Comment 4 Havoc Pennington 2002-06-09 04:27:02 UTC
Note to self, when we fix this it will probably break the task list,
because:

 - click tasklist
 - tasklist focuses clicked window
 - button release on panel focuses panel

Comment 5 Havoc Pennington 2002-08-10 18:36:04 UTC
Mail sent to wm-spec-list on this topic 8/10/2002
Comment 6 Rob Adams 2002-10-07 03:48:31 UTC
You wouldn't need to worry about the tasklist breaking if you handle
the click cleverly:  the release should only count if the original
click was in the window also, and no focus changes have happened in
the meantime.  I think that would cover everything.

Also note that this should apply to raising windows in sloppy focus
mode also.  Being able to drag and drop will be nice once they
actually implement it in nautilus (right now only works for icon view
-- not list or tree view.  grrrrr.)
Comment 7 Havoc Pennington 2002-10-07 04:08:03 UTC
Good idea to avoid the tasklist issue, and yep would definitely apply
to sloppy also. 

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86108 has some more random
discussion, and the wm-spec-list thread I think may have suggested 
some other possible issues.
Comment 8 Havoc Pennington 2003-01-25 23:59:38 UTC
*** Bug 104433 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 9 Havoc Pennington 2003-01-26 00:01:29 UTC
Retitling so I can find it (to cover "any solution to 86108")
Comment 10 mcamou 2003-01-26 00:25:15 UTC
The focus mode should also be independent of autoraise. I should be
able to click on a window to set the focus to it without necessarily
raising it, that option is available on most (if not all) window
managers. Currently, if you set click-to-focus mode it automatically
turns on autoraise and there's no way to turn it off.
Comment 11 Havoc Pennington 2003-02-15 20:48:47 UTC
*** Bug 104456 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 12 Havoc Pennington 2003-02-22 22:22:28 UTC
*** Bug 105906 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 13 Gregory Merchan 2004-02-03 00:42:10 UTC
Bug #128134 and bug #133034 describe all that metacity needs to do
to fix this; and have patches. The remaining work needs to be done
at the toolkit level. Bug #133047 depends on those bugs and on the
Gtk+ bugs for the remainder.
Comment 14 Andrew Clayton 2004-06-01 14:34:04 UTC
I was going to file a bug report, but this report looks like it 
covers it, esp the comment by mcamou@mail.com. I'll just emphasize 
my point of view.

The main thing I currently find annoying/unsable in Metacity 
right now is that even though I have window focus set to foucs 
follows mouse, if I click inside a window it gets raised. e.g

if I have a web browser window open behind a terminal window and 
I click in the web browser window, the web browser gets raised 
above my terminal. I don't believe this should happen. The web 
browser window should not get raised. If I want to raise it, then
I can click the title bar or the window border. IME this is how
other WM's do it.

So I believe that when the foucs mode is set to focus follows mouse
then click to raise should be disabled or at least configurable.

Cheers,
Comment 15 Steve Garcia 2004-06-04 17:47:09 UTC
I've avoided Metacity for years, because you could not disable "click to focus".

When I built this machine (using Gnome 2.4) I noticed that it seemed to be
fixed.  Halleluyah!  No more fiddling with getting another WM (enlightenment)
jammed into Gnome, or having to live with KDE which works correctly but is ugly.

It looks like the newest version (as part of Gnome 2.6) has "fixed" the fix, and
now click to focus is no longer an option, it's mandatory (again.)

This is very discouraging.  I guess it's time to go searching for Enlightenment
again.
Comment 16 Elijah Newren 2004-06-04 18:23:45 UTC
Andrew, Steve, others who want to "vote with comments": This has been discussed
at nauseating length before.  I too would like a raise-on-click preference (and
have manually created one), but Metacity's design goal is to make things that
"Just Work" for as many people as possible before resorting to preferences. 
Thus, someone needs to implement Havoc's request for things like don't raise on
drag-and-drop (but do raise otherwise on click) before such a preference can
even be considered.

For more details, please see bug 86108, bug 115072, and bug 115753 (and many,
many others...)
Comment 17 Elijah Newren 2004-10-06 19:01:26 UTC
See bug 152952; perhaps I should have just filed that info in this bug, but oh well.
Comment 18 Elijah Newren 2004-10-31 20:29:42 UTC
*** Bug 156980 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 19 Kevin Duffus 2005-05-18 18:44:47 UTC
I Just want to comment that in OS X when holding the command key down you can
drag and drop without shifting focus to the clicked window. Could a modifier key
also be used with metacity?
Comment 20 Eric Larson 2005-07-21 21:34:38 UTC
I think this addresses a usability issue that is present here. Say for example I
have an window open and I click in a web browser window. If I click on the web
browser window in a page and there is a link, the browser immediately goes to
that link. I believe OS X only brings the window to the top of the z-index and
focuses the window when you click on it (I am not sure whether this is on the
release or click). The window then has focus and something can be done with the
content then (ie a link can be clicked or text highlighted). 

I realize this may seem like two steps where only one is necessary but it does
open the opportunity for silly user errors. An extra click seems like an easy
fix to help those users that may accidently click a delete button of some kind
or close button where they just wanted to bring the window to focus. 
Comment 21 Octavio Alvarez Piza 2007-05-12 16:40:20 UTC
I'm noticing the same thing: I can't drag from a maximized window to a normal window without having to go through the window list in the panel. I have "Focus follows mouse" activated also, btw.

I'm noticing this bug is 5 years old...
Comment 22 Aditya Kavoor 2008-03-08 12:55:41 UTC
*** Bug 520807 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 23 André Klapper 2020-11-07 12:35:29 UTC
bugzilla.gnome.org is being replaced by gitlab.gnome.org. We are closing all
old feature requests in Bugzilla which have not seen updates for many years.

If you still use metacity and if you are still requesting this feature in a currently supported version of GNOME (currently that would be 3.38), then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/metacity/-/issues/

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry it could not be implemented.