Re: _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW, revisited

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 7/21/05, Billy Biggs <vektor dumbterm net> wrote:
>   Isn't the only application-class where you want this
> jump-to-current-desktop behaviour 'gaim' or other apps which have a task
> bar item, you click on it, and the gaim window appears on your current
> desktop?

Personally, no.

>   This seems like the special case to me.  You never want KMail or
> Mozilla to jump desktops unless you do something really crazy, and
> lots of apps have multiple windows they want to move focus between.

As far as I can tell, you've introduced a third possible policy that
could be implemented; I don't think it matches what either Lubos or I
had in mind.  I think that helps my case, though.  I'm not trying to
argue what the policy of the WM should be, I'm just arguing that there
are more valid policies and that the policy shouldn't be built into
the spec because that results in apps/pagers/WMs working around it
when they don't like it.  I hate having a desktop where all apps
behave totally differently.  This kind of thing was the whole reason
_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE was introduced and the motif hints were
deprecated.


Incidentally, I just realized that our window selector is buggy.  We'd
like an activation-from-pager-that-is-workspace-aware kind of hint,
but there isn't any and we currently get the behavior _we_ want by
doing _net_current_desktop + _net_active_window.  That's wrong because
it's an attempt to enforce policy when the WM should decide it.  In
particular, the WM should be allowed to treat such activation requests
by moving the window to the workspace where the user is.  So, I need
to pull that code out of gnome-panel/libwnck and instead create a
message type (_GNOME_ACTIVATION?) and use it where available
(otherwise using the _net_active_window as it currently stands) until
an activation-from-pager-that-is-workspace-aware hint is added to the
EWMH.


Elijah