Re: Focus stealing prevention

[Wayne Schuller <k_wayne schuller id au>]

hi Elijah,

On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 16:14 -0700, Elijah Newren wrote:
> Focus stealing prevention is active in Metacity.  Roughly, it means
> that if a window was launched at time A, and the user interacted with
> a different window at time B, and B>A, then the launched window will
> not be focused when it appears.  This allows a user to work with an
> application while impatiently waiting for that really slow app
> (*cough* OpenOffice *cough*) to show up without being interrupted
> mid-thought when it finally does.  It also prevents those annoying
> Instant Message windows from taking your keystrokes and sending them
> to someone when you meant to be typing them into the application
> window asking for your root password.

This is very welcome news.

One related trick which I find quite helpful is to change your gnome
default browser to the "custom web browser" of: "galeon --noraise -n %s"
(in the preferences->preferred applications)

This allows me to click on links from evolution, my rss aggregator and
other gnome programs, and the web page is silently loaded in a new tab
of my current galeon window, without raising a new browser (or even an
old one).

I'm sure others could post relevant commands for epiphany and firefox.

This trick combined with the improved logic in metacity would great
improve the usability of gnome. 

thanks,
wayne