GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 76672
Handle cases where windows should not raise on click (e.g. focus windows only on button release, DND, always on top, whatever)
Last modified: 2020-11-07 12:35:29 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. :- (
You're saying the focus should come on mouse button release, not mouse button press? that makes sense.
that's exactly what I mean. :)
Enhancement, but this would solve most cases of bug 80984 [for the record.]
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
Mail sent to wm-spec-list on this topic 8/10/2002
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.)
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.
*** Bug 104433 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Retitling so I can find it (to cover "any solution to 86108")
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.
*** Bug 104456 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 105906 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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.
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,
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.
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...)
See bug 152952; perhaps I should have just filed that info in this bug, but oh well.
*** Bug 156980 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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?
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.
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...
*** Bug 520807 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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.