GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 669139
raise_on_click=false is ignored if focus_mode=click
Last modified: 2014-12-29 06:38:27 UTC
Apparently this was introduced as a result of https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326156 From what I can piece together after all these years, it seems that disabling raise_on_click was advocated as a workaround for some bug in a pager application, which ired some gnome developers so much that they wanted take away the option from everybody but there was enough backlash from people that used a focus follows mouse policy for them to make an exception in this case. There was also the issue that raise_on_click was implemented incorrectly as raise_on_activate for a long time, luckily the (trivial) fix for this issue has been applied since. Now, there is no technical reason for disallowing raise-on-click for a click-to-focus, in fact this is what a lot of people (myself included) prefer. It seems cruel to take away this option based on some petty politics that nobody can remember anyway. I've been using the attached patch for a while now and I can discern any adverse consequences so for (and extensive copy-and-pasting a lot won't raise my blood pressure anymore). The same patch presumably applies to metacity as well, but I have not tested it. Something should also be done about the description of the raise_on_click gconf key, which is mostly incorrect and mildly insulting right now.
Created attachment 225178 [details] [review] fix Hmm, looks like I never actually attached the patch...
I can confirm that Tom's patch works correctly. TL;DR - raise-on-click doesn't work correctly with click-to-focus, and the patch seems to fix it.
Created attachment 225232 [details] [review] Update docs for org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences.raise-on-click Now that this is fixed in mutter via https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669139, it no longer makes sense to talk about old bugs or inconsistencies when raise-on-click is turned off. We simply describe what the option does.
The previous patch is for gsettings-desktop-schemas, BTW. It just updates the docs for the configuration key.
I agree wholeheartedly with what Tom Jaeger said in the description. I used to prefer sloppy focus so I didn't care all that much, but now I'd rather use click to focus. Please can the patch be adopted. I'm not entirely sure about the status of mutter wrt gnome-shell though. I use the latter, so should I open a new bug for it? Or are they built from the same code so that a bugrep for one automatically applies to the other?
https://git.gnome.org/browse/mutter/commit/?id=93b7137c62810460d65acaeab20cb08973d370b5