Re: [External] : Re: master 127ab231be 1/2: Attempt to clarify Input Focus documentation

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2013 bytes --]

Moved to emacs-tangents.

On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 10:54 PM Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:
> > [...] I do miss having the focus follow the mouse,
> > which I recall from UNIX/X Window behavior long ago.
>
> Interesting.  Personally, I don't miss that behavior at all, having
> spent a lot of time on older X setups running uwm/twm in the past, one
> complaint being the input focus randomly moving to other windows while
> typing upon accidental mouse motion (typically caused by dirty mouse
> balls.)
>
> It is also rather painful to program for, especially when your program
> uses window nesting liberally.
>

Back in the day, X programs knew how to distinguish between windows
appearing/disappearing on their own and the window under the mouse being
changed by the window manager, and focus could be managed appropriately.
WM's of the time also had (configurable) thresholds for whether such
accidental movements would trigger focus changes or not.

It was a more complicated, much more powerful model, but then the Windows95
"look and feel" took over roughly everything, Apple fused Mach, FreeBSD,
and NeXTSTEP together into a workable alternative OS (from a UI
perspective), and GUIs moved strongly away from power towards
approachability. Then higher-level window/display/GUI systems started
stomping out any possible diversity in capability in the name of some
combination of "easier UI for less experienced users" and "put those
expensive GPUs to use".

As near as I can tell, this is how, for one glaring example, Gnome got to
its current state, spawning things like XFCE, Cinnamon, and MATE along the
way. Much like how Google, Microsoft, and a handful of others have made it
practically impossible to run a private email server these days, GNOME,
Wayland, and "choose: Win95 or Mac OS appearance" have made the days of
things like gwm and exwm all but numbered. While there are
definitely upsides, this is definitely not a strictly better world.

~Chad

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2585 bytes --]