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BOINC / boinc

Open-source software for volunteer computing and grid computing.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
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Manager window brought to foreground when focused #1347

Open romw opened 9 years ago

romw commented 9 years ago

Reported by Nicolas on 17 Mar 45021482 09:43 UTC I use focus follows mouse on Linux (KWin4 window manager). Moving the mouse over a window makes it get the focus, without bringing it to the foreground.

However, the BOINC Manager jumps to the foreground when I give it focus that way, ie. when I move the mouse over its unfocused window. It's the only application I have that does this. Audacity, which is also based on wxWidgets, doesn't have this behavior.

Migrated-From: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/ticket/1376

AenBleidd commented 2 years ago

@RichardHaselgrove, any possibility you could try to reproduce this to verify if this is still an issue?

RichardHaselgrove commented 2 years ago

Ouch - never tried anything as sophisticated that in Linux, although I have Linux with GUI and mice to drive them.

On a related note, 'marquee select' (hold mouse button down while dragging the pointer across all or part of a list, to multiselect a range of items), doesn't seem to work on Linux/wxWidgets.

Edit - but I'll try to take a look at the original problem as time allows.

RichardHaselgrove commented 2 years ago

OK, found some time and where this behaviour is to be found in my distro - it's in 'Windows Preferences', where it offers:

image

That description suits me better. As a Windows programmer, I had screens with very many controls on them - text boxes, combo boxes, buttons, radio buttons, and so on. To me, the 'focus' was always on a single control, and my concern was with the tab order within the window - which control was selected when the window was first opened, and did the focus move from control to control in a logical order when the tab (or shift-tab) key was pressed. Looking at the search results for "focus follows the mouse", people are talking about keyboard input being taken to the window under the pointer.

That makes sense if you're writing half a dozen novels on the same screen at the same time, and want to pop an idea that's just come into your mind, or a snatch of dialog, into a different novel. But for an application with lots of controls, and primarily designed for conveying information from the computer to the user, I can't see how a BOINC Manager window that has focus, but you can't read because it's behind other other windows, makes any sense. There's no page in the BOINC Manager that accepts free text input.

Having said that - yes, the behaviour is still present. I'm typing this into a Firefox window, and I have a couple of BOINC fragments peeking out from behind it. if I nudge the mouse accidentally over part of BOINC - either the Manager, or the Message Log - both BOINC Windows come to the foreground and I can't read what I've written so far without a mouse click into Firefox. Where I diverted myself into searching the multiple discussions of clean versus messy desks...

I can see this being irritating if you're the "messy desktop" type - but I suspect it would be difficult, and interfere with many subtle 'tab order' decisions, if we tried to change it. Just minimise BOINC if it annoys you.