Re: proposal for a smarter behavior for raising windows on mouse click

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Tuesday 27 of January 2004 19:02, Martin Grimme wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have seen there has been an endless discussion going on about whether
> mouse clicks into the window area should raise a window in metacity or
> not. Havoc's point of view was that we should not ask for yes or no, but
> think of a smarter window manager behavior.
>
> >From what I have heard, users don't want windows to be raised during:
>
> - drag and drop
> - selecting text
> - using the scrollbars

 This sounds familiar ...

>
> This led me to the idea that certain widgets could e.g. set a
> _NET_WM_DONT_RAISE flag on their toplevel window which the window
> manager checks before actually raising the window.
>
> Imagine the following scenario:
> - user clicks on scrollbar arrow
> - scrollbar knows that it should not raise the window
> - scrollbar sets _NET_WM_DONT_RAISE on its toplevel window
> - window manager detects the mouse click and checks for the
>   flag
> - window manager takes action depending on whether the flag is set
>   or not and unsets the flag
>
> (In case that mouse clicks reach the window manager before they reach
> the widget, the window manager may check for raising in an
> idle handler.)
>
> That way, widgets can determine from the context whether the window is
> to be raised or not. All this would of course involve code changes in
> the toolkit, maybe applications, and the window manager.
>
> Any comments on this idea?

 Could you please explain step by step how this would work in the case of 
drag&drop? Note that there exists something called start drag distance, 
causing DND to be really initiated only after dragging for few pixels, thus 
preventing unwanted DND, e.g. in case people are not too skilled with the 
mouse. I sense few obstacles ahead.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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