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Re: [External] : Re: master 127ab231be 1/2: Attempt to clarify Input Foc


From: chad
Subject: Re: [External] : Re: master 127ab231be 1/2: Attempt to clarify Input Focus documentation
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2022 12:16:59 -0400


Moved to emacs-tangents.

On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 10:54 PM Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> wrote:
Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:
> [...] I do miss having the focus follow the mouse,
> which I recall from UNIX/X Window behavior long ago.

Interesting.  Personally, I don't miss that behavior at all, having
spent a lot of time on older X setups running uwm/twm in the past, one
complaint being the input focus randomly moving to other windows while
typing upon accidental mouse motion (typically caused by dirty mouse
balls.)

It is also rather painful to program for, especially when your program
uses window nesting liberally.

Back in the day, X programs knew how to distinguish between windows appearing/disappearing on their own and the window under the mouse being changed by the window manager, and focus could be managed appropriately. WM's of the time also had (configurable) thresholds for whether such accidental movements would trigger focus changes or not.

It was a more complicated, much more powerful model, but then the Windows95 "look and feel" took over roughly everything, Apple fused Mach, FreeBSD, and NeXTSTEP together into a workable alternative OS (from a UI perspective), and GUIs moved strongly away from power towards approachability. Then higher-level window/display/GUI systems started stomping out any possible diversity in capability in the name of some combination of "easier UI for less experienced users" and "put those expensive GPUs to use". 

As near as I can tell, this is how, for one glaring example, Gnome got to its current state, spawning things like XFCE, Cinnamon, and MATE along the way. Much like how Google, Microsoft, and a handful of others have made it practically impossible to run a private email server these days, GNOME, Wayland, and "choose: Win95 or Mac OS appearance" have made the days of things like gwm and exwm all but numbered. While there are definitely upsides, this is definitely not a strictly better world.

~Chad

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