Re: Global keybindings and keyboard focus

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

Hi,

On Dec 23, 2007 11:36 AM, Ho-Sheng Hsiao <hosh isshen com> wrote:
>
> Note to moderator: I was not sure where to send this to, as I could not
> find a list for people developing apps with Metacity in mind. If there
> were a better place for me to email or post this question, please let me
> know.
>
> I'd like to know if there is a way to assign certain keystrokes to the
> keyboard focus of a program not currently in focus. For example, if I
> were using Tilda (I didn't write Tilda), and I assign F1 so that it
> drops down the terminal, the F1 keystroke should have been a part of
> Tilda's keyboard focus, and as such, anything I type after that should
> go into the Tilda terminal and not whatever it was I was doing.
>
>
> I've read that Metacity figures out the keyboard focus based on when the
> keyboard focus was last on a program. The most recent one is the one
> that retains focus. If I had set Tilda to wakeup on F1, however,
> wouldn't it make more sense that the F1 keystroke would make Tilda the
> most recently focused window?

I do not understand what you are doing or the exact nature of the
behavior you are seeing (how are you binding F1 to an action, and what
is the exact action it is bound to?  what is happening when you press
F1?  What do you expect to happen?  What in the world is Tilda and how
does it relate to a terminal?).

However, an important thing to point out is that the WM does _not_
control keyboard focus.  The xserver does and the window manager has
limited hinting and observing capabilities.  Section 3 of "Why X is
Not Our Ideal Window System" is a great read on the subject --
http://www.std.org/msm/common/WhyX.pdf.  As such, the behavior you are
observing may be entirely unfixable, or may well be a bug in an app
you are using (tilda?).

If you can dig up more details and explain the situation in more
detail, a bug report on bugzilla would be the right place to go.

Hope that helps,
Elijah