GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 599261
Add a new_windows_always_on_top preference
Last modified: 2020-11-06 20:06:10 UTC
Continuing the trend of "patches to make Metacity lovers howl", here's a preference to always put new windows on top, even when they are focus denied. The reasoning here is that given sufficiently much real-estate in the form of large monitors and multihead, the current behavior where if a window would overlap it is buried and flashed in the taskbar doesn't work very well - the task bar is no longer in the user's peripheral vision, and even if they notice it, it can be a long way to mouse to. (A sophisticated user may know that a single tap of Alt-Tab will get to the flashing window, but many users will not catch on to this.) This preference (as noted in the GConf schema) is really meant for mouse/sloppy focus where we more frequently break the relationship of focused and on-top. But I don't think it makes sense to make it a no-op for focus_mode=click. We do break that relationship occasionally already even in that case, and its less confusing to try the key and find you don't like it then to have the key do nothing. There's a bit of a dependency here on bug 599097 - this patch makes it even more likely you'll get to the state where a window is under the pointer but not focused, so having an easy way to recover from that is nice. In the case where the new window *completely* obscures the focus window, it might be nice to focus the no-focus-window to avoid keystrokes going to a hidden window, but I didn't want to add more code to complete "completely obscures" just for an obscure preference. It would be wrong to focus the no-focus-window if the new window is only a small window that overlaps a bit of the focus window - that basically reintroduces the annoyance of focus-stealing, if not the security threat.
Created attachment 146010 [details] [review] Add a new_windows_always_on_top preference Add a /apps/metacity/general/new_windows_always_on_top preference. When set, new windows are always placed on top, even if they are denied focus. This is useful on large screens and multihead setups where the tasklist can be hard to notice and difficult to mouse to, so the normal behavior of flashing in the tasklist is less effective.
Created attachment 164454 [details] [review] Apply new_windows_always_on_top to newly raised/activated windows Testing revealed that this patch met its objectives; however, users expected the consistent behavior to occur for windows that tried to raise or focus themselves - these windows are "new to the user" if not entirely new. This add-on patch implements that.
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