Re: MDI (not winMDI) frameworks ... again

[Ken Harris <ken bitpoetry com>]

> In the meantime, developers are left hanging with putting out apps that 
> have just way too many windows. I've used Gimp on my OSX box and it 
> totally sucks having to first clicking the window to get focus before 
> being able to click the item. If the app ran on a MDI framework, this 
> would not be necessary.

This has nothing to do with MDI, or Gimp, or even click-to-focus.  This
is about click-through.

On the Mac, "click-through" determines whether you can click on an item
in an un-focused window directly, or if you have to click on the window
to focus it first.  Typically, things like "Delete" buttons don't get
click-through, so you can switch to another application easily without
fear of doing something dangerous.

X -- or specifically, toolkits for X, like Gtk+ -- have no concept of
click-through.  Window managers simply make everything click-through (or
nothing, depending on your window manager, apparently).

I haven't used Gimp on the Mac, but I suspect they simply disabled
click-through for all X windows.

I use Gimp on my Linux box with Metacity (click-to-focus) and it works
just fine.  No need to click twice here.

An interesting project would be to add support for (real,
developer-gets-to-choose-per-widget) click-through to Gtk+.


- Ken