proposal for a smarter behavior for raising windows on mouse click

[Martin Grimme <martin pycage de>]

Hi,

I have seen there has been an endless discussion going on about whether
mouse clicks into the window area should raise a window in metacity or
not. Havoc's point of view was that we should not ask for yes or no, but
think of a smarter window manager behavior.

>From what I have heard, users don't want windows to be raised during:
- drag and drop
- selecting text
- using the scrollbars

This led me to the idea that certain widgets could e.g. set a
_NET_WM_DONT_RAISE flag on their toplevel window which the window
manager checks before actually raising the window.

Imagine the following scenario:
- user clicks on scrollbar arrow
- scrollbar knows that it should not raise the window
- scrollbar sets _NET_WM_DONT_RAISE on its toplevel window
- window manager detects the mouse click and checks for the
  flag
- window manager takes action depending on whether the flag is set
  or not and unsets the flag

(In case that mouse clicks reach the window manager before they reach
the widget, the window manager may check for raising in an
idle handler.)

That way, widgets can determine from the context whether the window is
to be raised or not. All this would of course involve code changes in
the toolkit, maybe applications, and the window manager.

Any comments on this idea?


Bye, Martin