Re: VirtualBox and keyboard grabs

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

One option would be for GNOME to be able to only take a pointer grab
if the keyboard is taken when dragging windows. It might be confusing
or dangerous to the user though -- key presses would go to the guest
when interacting with windows on the host.

If you don't select for KeyPressMask / KeyReleaseMask, and instead
have it on your window mask, and have owner_events in the grab, then I
believe that might make things work when mutter makes these changes.
When another window takes key focus through dragging, key events will
be dropped. The downside is that the application wouldn't receive
events while not focused. If that isn't a problem, this might just be
an option for you.

I don't think there's any greater option here. If you have a grab, you
have exclusive control of the keyboard device, and mutter can't say
"ha, jinx!" and steal it back. There have been proposed solutions for
this problem ( https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Grab_override )
but I doubt we will see them being done any time soon. I think Peter
even abandoned the Grab Override concept, actually.

On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 6:50 AM, Michael Thayer
<michael thayer oracle com> wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> This is a question related to running VirtualBox on a host system with GNOME
> Shell (it actually applies to Metacity and Unity too).  Basically our
> problem is that when we do a full keyboard grab, it is not possible to drag
> windows with GNOME Shell  (I haven't checked very recently, but I don't
> think it has changed in the meantime).  I do understand why that happens.
> We have worked around this since time immemorial by using XGrabKey() instead
> of XGrabKeyboard() except when we are in full-screen mode.  I was wondering
> though, if anyone had a better idea as to how to solve it.  Remmina does it
> by dropping grabs when the mouse pointer leaves its window, which we did not
> really consider an improvement on what we have now, since it is potentially
> confusing for non-focus-follows-mouse sorts of people.
>
> Any thoughts welcome, and if no one has any good solution thanks anyway.
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael
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-- 
  Jasper