> SR> I think this is wrong, at least as I understand pointer focus.
> SR> Maybe you're thinking of sloppy focus or something. Pointer
> SR> focus is where the window with the mouse cursor in it has the
> SR> keyboard focus. There are no exceptions to this rule, and
> SR> warping the cursor is the only way an application can ensure
> SR> that one of its windows gets the focus.
>
> This is just not true. An application can manage focus internally
> among its top-level windows, essentially redirecting focus to any of
> their top-level windows (and of course to any widget within those
> windows), as long as the pointer is in any one of the application's
> windows. I've appended a very simple Python/Tkinter application to
> prove it.
I stand corrected: an application can do this by calling
XSetInputFocus on the other window without prompting by the WM to do
so (you can do this with MetaCard too by explicitly setting the focus
to a field within a dialog in an openCard or openStack handler). Mwm
supports this behavior as well.
It should be possible to do this with Xt/Motif too, but I can't find
any Motif applications that work this way, and there are no built-in
Xt or Xm commands to do this, and so I'd guess they're very rare if
they exist at all. I can't find any reference to this technique in
any of the style guides nor in any of the Motif books we have. The
ICCCM is pretty vague in this area, other than to state that it's
important that you set the revert_to field correctly lest your app
screw up keyboard focus for all the others.
Thanks for pointing this out. I don't find it surprising that this
technique isn't very commonly used, however. Though I can see how it
is useful in getting around one of the major problems with pointer
focus, it has the feel of an unecessary hack to me. Why should the
app developer have to deal with things at this low of a level? The WM
should manage the direction of focus to dialogs when they open, and
they all do this correctly automatically if you use explicit focus.
Regards,
Scott
--
***************************************************************
Scott Raney raney_at_metacard.com http://www.metacard.com
Tcl and ksh: syntactic gymnastics
MetaCard: it does what you think
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Received on Sat Oct 26 1996 - 19:40:18 BST