Re: panel prelight on focus

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> [1] In that, to the best of my knowledge, no other desktops have a
> panel/dock thing that you can focus independently of the objects on it,
> so none of them need a way of showing focus.  This, perhaps, points to
> our underlying problem... :)

I think there's a better solution to this problem in general, but its
much trickier technically. Conceptually I think the panel should behave
as if it were a part of the currently focused window. This would be bad
for some things like dialogues I guess, but for example, I don't think
pulling down the Applications menu should unfocus the current window,
and I think perhaps the panel should be accessible through the tab chain
of the currently focused window, and pressing Alt-Whatever should
activate the panel menus too if they have accelerators[1]. Course, this
is probably nearly impossible to implement, but I think its worth
throwing out there in case somebody has a bright idea.

But... that said... I'm still not sure I understand why the panel itself
needs to be focusable (as opposed to the objects on it). Well, I do for
GNOME 2.0 since we have important things in the right click menu, but I
think we all agree right click menus aren't a solution anyway, and we
need that functionality elsewhere as it is. So in the long term, is
there a compelling reason to have the panel focusable, and not just the
objects on it?

-Seth


[1] How do you prevent applications from using panel accelerators? Well,
we'd have to fix things when we first did this, but in the future people
wouldn't use them, because they wouldn't work, because they'd focus the
panel ;-) Also, we could choose more obscure accelerators for the panel
menus. So we could use A_pplications rather than _Applications. And
Ac_tions. Or something like that.