On Nov 25, 2007, at 9:55 AM, Merton Campbell Crockett wrote:
Had I wanted to switch Spaces, I would have moved the cursor out of
the current Window to the desktop and then entered Ctrl-<numeric> to
move to another Space.
Clearly, I have a preference for a "focus follows mouse" policy.
Mac OS X is the only system that I have that still requires you to
"select" a window to shift focus. As an aside, Microsoft did
require me to purchase a resource kit to get the "focus follows
mouse" policy.
There are good reasons not to allow focus-follows-mouse, particularly
when you have a system-wide menu bar. Obviously, having an application
steal focus on the way to the menu would be a bad thing! However, I
will grant you that the Openbox window manager has a focusing delay,
which makes the system wait a configurable time before giving focus to
a window. This would solve the menu problem.
The window manager wm2 (which I've never used for more than 10
minutes) has a little manifesto on the main page (http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wm2
). Point 4 of this manifesto: "The click-to-focus versus focus-follows-
pointer war is not really important. Most people can get used to
either." While I used to disagree with the statement, my time with the
Macintosh has convinced me that he is right. You get used to either,
and it doesn't make much difference. Move then click, or just move...
it doesn't amount to much difference in time.
With virtualization the rage, how do Fusion and Parallels get key
events that might otherwise be diverted by the host operating system?
Is there a mechanism to "escape" a key event to indicate that I want
the key event to go to the current window or to the host operating
system?
In days of yore when I worked with the DEC System-10, it was
possible for an application to put itself in an event chain and
selectively handle events. Were the event not significant to the
application, it would pass to the next application requesting the
event or to the operating system.
I agree with this chain of command. The difference is that I think
things like the window server and high-level applications like Spaces
belong at the top of the chain. Hence, they will steal all of their
keys from the stack.
--
Andrew J. Hesford <email@hidden>
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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