[Novalug] [Opinion] The age of "Guilt-By-Knowledge" and how the anti-system crowd has "won"

William Sutton william@trilug.org
Thu Apr 30 11:01:02 EDT 2015


Focus-follows-mouse is very handy (as opposed to click-to-focus) when you 
want to highlight-copy some text in one window and paste it in another 
without having the stacking of the windows change.  It is also more 
convenient for bouncing between windows without having to alt-tab through 
10 different windows or click-focus a specific window.  I currently have 
30 windows (not kidding) open on my Windows 7 desktop at work.  That's 
about 2x as many as I usually have open, and a lot of them are terminals, 
but still...  I don't really want to alt+tab through all of those to get 
to the one I want.  And I realize that this is a Linux list but you can 
enable focus-follows-mouse in Windows.  Between that and Cygwin, it's 
almost as usable as my Enlightenment .16 window manager.


William Sutton

On Thu, 30 Apr 2015, Derek LaHousse via Novalug wrote:

> My mouse is something I use when I'm not using my keyboard... Why
> would I want it to change focus?  It's useful to move a scrollbar, and
> to put my windows in some configuration... But that's about it... When
> would I be selecting windows with a mouse just to put my hands back on
> the keyboard to enter some text?  (Gnome-Shell) When I need to change
> windows within an application, I use alt-`, and changing apps is
> alt-tab.  Shift reverses order.  ctrl-alt-{up,down} give me
> workspaces, where generally a few apps live together, fullscreen.
>
> But seriously, I *don't* want focus to follow mouse because I'm
> working in one window, and just scrolling another for reference.  I
> want to direct the wheel input, but I'm not using the X-Y axis.  So I
> for one appreciate that it is configurable.
>
> Of course, I have a puny 1366x768 display, so maybe it's different
> when you've got 4k to work with and like wasted space just to make a
> text column a nice width.
>
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 9:15 AM, Bryan J Smith via Novalug
> <novalug@firemountain.net> wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 7:38 AM, greg pryzby via Novalug
>> <novalug@firemountain.net> wrote:
>>> It is possible to configure. I think I have it working in F21.
>>
>> Again, it's _always_ been _cake_ to configure.
>>
>> But once again, people in this thread have _proven_ my point.  I just
>> used Focus-follows-Mouse as an example of a "default" that I change
>> quickly and easily and don't given another thought to it.
>>
>> But for others, it's yet another "LP killed JFK" moment in the history
>> of Linux.  ;)
>>
>> -- bjs
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