compiz - Mar 2007 - sticky windows and rotate focus

Hi everyone,

One thing that has always annoyed me about compiz is how rotate
handles sticky windows.  If you have a sticky window on your desktop,
it will usually (always?) get focus when you rotate to a different
face on the cube.  This happens even when other windows have been
focused more recently on the face you rotate to.

This seems like silly behaviour, because sticky windows are (for me)
'background' windows like media players, IM clients, and so on.  The
non-sticky windows are where I do all my work, so focus should go
there whenever I rotate faces.

I've attached a patch that fixes this.  It makes focusDefaultWindow
only focus a sticky window if it already had focus.  This means that
if you do focus a sticky window and rotate faces, that window will
stay focused.

I'm not really sure what other consequences this change has, but I
haven't found any problems so far.  Can anyone offer some advice?

Steve
-------------- next part --------------
diff --git a/src/display.c b/src/display.c
index 9dcf0a1..5c763b3 100644
--- a/src/display.c
+++ b/src/display.c
@@ -3135,7 +3135,12 @@ focusDefaultWindow (CompDisplay *d)
 		    }
 		}
 		else
-		    focus = w;
+		{
+		    /* only focus sticky window if it already had focus */
+		    if (!(w->state & CompWindowStateStickyMask) ||
+			w->id == d->activeWindow)
+			focus = w;
+		}
 	    }
 	}
     }

On Sat, 2007-03-03 at 10:31 -0700, Steve Leung wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> One thing that has always annoyed me about compiz is how rotate
> handles sticky windows.  If you have a sticky window on your desktop,
> it will usually (always?) get focus when you rotate to a different
> face on the cube.  This happens even when other windows have been
> focused more recently on the face you rotate to.
The problem is that when you map a sticky window or make a window sticky
you usually give it input focus. Later when switching to a different
viewport the sticky window will be the last window of the windows on the
new viewport that had focus, hence it receives input focus again and is
now the last focused window when when you rotate to some other viewport.
> 
> This seems like silly behaviour, because sticky windows are (for me)
> 'background' windows like media players, IM clients, and so on. 
The
> non-sticky windows are where I do all my work, so focus should go
> there whenever I rotate faces.
I don't like to add special treatment to sticky windows because they are
often used in a specific way but I guess it's not too bad and I don't
have a better solution right now. Do you know what other WMs are doing
about this problem?
> 
> I've attached a patch that fixes this.  It makes focusDefaultWindow
> only focus a sticky window if it already had focus.  This means that
> if you do focus a sticky window and rotate faces, that window will
> stay focused.
> 
> I'm not really sure what other consequences this change has, but I
> haven't found any problems so far.  Can anyone offer some advice?
The problem would be that someone would have sticky windows that they
don't want to behave this way and would complain about them not getting
focused properly.

- David