Re: focus policy in gnome 2.0

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 07:36:27PM +0100, Hrvoje Blazevic wrote:
> I have noticed that the configuration of focus policy is gradually becoming 
> more and more difficult.

With the window manager installed by default, you mean.

[...]
> The problem is this; what's the point of enabling focus follows mouse 
> policy, if one can't disable the window being raised when inner window is 
> clicked?
> 
> How do I disable that?

By default, Red Hat 8.0 installs Metacity as the window manager. The
design policy in Metacity is to try and avoid configuration options and
just implement one choice that trys to suit a large number of people. In
that respect, being able to choose whether focus follows mouse or not is
a concession. So Havoc (the Metacity maintainer) has a made a choice
about how "focus follows mouse" will work and implemented it.

Opinions are still very divided about whether the "make one choice for
everybody" policy is ideal, but the people writing the code and on the
usability team and the release team seem to think it's not too harmful,
so that's the way things are moving.

If you want to be able to customise things further, install a different
window manager. Sawfish would be the obvious choice for GNOME, since
it's actively maintained and allows you to customise as much as you want
(although whether the customisations are easy or not is another
question). Completely dropping GNOME and installing KDE is obviously an
overreaction -- there are less intrusive changes you can make to use a
different window manager.

Malcolm

-- 
Always try to be modest and be proud of it!