GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 653020
Choosing a window from the "Activities" pane should guarantee window focus
Last modified: 2011-06-21 14:12:06 UTC
When using "focus follows mouse", selecting a window in the "Activities" pane will not always give that window focus. If you have multiple windows on the screen, particularly if one is full-screen and there are other smaller windows, using the "Activities" pane to choose a window lays the windows out in a slighlty zoomed out, geometric pattern similar to the actual layout, but not identical. When the window is selected with a left click, the geometric layout returns to its actual layout but the mouse does not move. If the actual layout results in the mouse being over a different window, that window will end up having focus. Either: 1 Gnome Shell should "warp" the mouse to an equivalent position on the chosen window to the location of the left-click or: 2 Gnome Shell should focus-lock the chosen window, so that it retains focus even though the mouse is now over a different window. Out of the two, I prefer the warp method. Even though it means that the mouse position would be adjusted automatically, it avoids breaking the "focus follows mouse" model.
I don't agree that moving the pointer automatically is a good solution; most users would think of the mouse pointer as the way they control the computer - telling them that they don't actually have control by moving the pointer around is rather rude. Anyway, I'll close this as a dupe of an existing ffm bug - the second patch there happens to fix this issue as well ... *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 597190 ***
Having read through all the comments, (especially comment 38 in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=597190) I doubt you can fix focus-follow-mouse in all scenarios without moving the mouse position. If the mouse position does not move relative to its position within the window, I think the user could cope. Anyway, thanks for the dup pointer. Not sure how I missed that one in the searches I did.
(In reply to comment #1) > I don't agree that moving the pointer automatically is a good solution; most > users would think of the mouse pointer as the way they control the computer - > telling them that they don't actually have control by moving the pointer around > is rather rude. If other FFM users think it's OK, then let's just do it IMO. It's an easter egg as is, the people contributing patches get to own it I'd say (except where it interacts with the designed UI or contains nontrivial support code).