Re: Application menus

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org>]

On Fri, 2013-07-05 at 22:04 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:

> Focus-follows-mouse makes it worse (especially when it's a trackpad, and
> a large screen, and a small application like empathy which happens to be
> on the *other* side of the screen for where its bizarrely detached menu
> now lives.

I don't think the app menu is well thought-out enough (footnote: it
seems that the new MacOS puts a menu bar in all monitors, which sounds
like a good idea).  Regardless of that...

I used to be a firm believer in focus-follows-mouse, and I switched to
click-to-focus recently after about 18 years of FFM.  About the only two
things that bothered me about FFM were that muggles would get massively
confused when borrowing my computer, and that the Gimp's layers dialog
didn't work quite right (it shows the layers for the focused image
window).

Then the app menu appeared, and since Empathy and Totem pretty much
forced me to use it, I switched to click-to-focus.

It took me about a month to get used to CTF.  I don't mind it now so
much.  The scrollwheel thankfully works on unfocused windows.  About the
only things that became clunkier are debugging GUI apps (for which I
should really have been using a second computer, anyway, but
focus-follows-mouse kind of made it possible), and bgo#687850 (two
monitors, wrong focus when switching workspaces).

Oddly enough, even before the transition period, using my wife's Mac and
being forced to use click-to-focus there didn't seem uncomfortable.
Expectations, or not being used to using that system as fluidly, I
guess.

TL;DR Switching from focus-follows-mouse to click-to-focus was painful,
worth it, and I don't have a good reason to defend either these days.
YMMV.  Also, there are real bugs in either mode that seem to get little
attention because they are in Mutter rather than in Gnome-shell.

  Federico