Re: _NET_WM_[GET_|TAKE_|REQUEST_]FOCUS & urgency

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

Hi Lubos,

On 5/31/05, Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz> wrote:

>  "One possible thing to do". The Kopete option is there because (I presume)
> some people simply want that window to be activated when a new message
> arrives. There are also other kinds of (less intrusive) notifications like
> using DEMANDS_ATTENTION, using KNotify stuff like a passive popup, and
> whatever.
> 
>  If, hypothetically, we agree that this is bad and we should only support
> Urgency for this, and you make Metacity activate&raise urgent windows, and I
> simply make KWin (and the KDE taskbar) blink the taskbar entry, what is a
> user supposed to do if they really want that window to be activated?

Um...complain to the WM author and/or request that there be more than
one type of needs-attention for applications?  Granted, you know a lot
more about X, ICCCM, etc. than I do, but I still am of the opinion
that this is a bug in Kopete.

Here's the angle I'm coming at it from:  Similar to your question,
what if the user wants to be able to place Kopete windows at the edge
of the screen or next to other windows more easily?  Some WMs (e.g.
Metacity) don't yet have edge resistance--should Kopete offer the user
an option so that Kopete will make the windows override redirect and
handle window placement and movement manually?  WMs may exist which
don't focus any new windows and which additionally don't support
_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW (granted, I doubt there are any which do this
without at least providing an option to focus new windows).  Should
Kopete offer an option to attempt to force the window to take focus
anyway by calling XSetInputFocus?

There may be a good reason to have different kinds of Urgency with
different ways of being displayed to the user, but I'd rather support
something like that that through some UrgencyType spec extension with
apps using that than having apps encode policy.

Anyway, that's just my $0.02.  

Cheers,
Elijah