[573] in Athena User Interface
Re: No focus for newly-launched apps
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nathan J. Williams)
Wed Jan 3 19:13:35 2001
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@mit.edu>
Cc: aui@mit.edu
From: nathanw@MIT.EDU (Nathan J. Williams)
Date: 03 Jan 2001 19:13:24 -0500
In-Reply-To: "Christopher D. Beland"'s message of "Wed, 03 Jan 2001 18:45:00 -0500"
Message-ID: <mtud7e4kwd7.fsf@contents-vnder-pressvre.mit.edu>
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<beland@MIT.EDU> (Christopher D. Beland) writes:
> If there's no way to differentiate between a new program starting and
> a program, say, throwing up a error dialog box once a minute, then the
> resulting behavior could be annoying in some circumstances. (Think
> AOL-IM or ICQ.)
This may be compeletely off-track, since I've never used any of the
window managers or desktop tools in question, but...
Auto-focus for new *transient* windows is pretty useful; my main
application of it is typing immediately into pop-up dialog boxes. This
makes it possible, for example, to run Netscape with much less pointer
use, since I can type Alt-O to get a URL dialog box, and type without
having to move the pointer in to get focus. This behavior is also much
more like Windows, and IMO, what people expect.
(At the moment, zephyrgram windows aren't transient by default, so new
messages won't steal focus.)
If a program is throwing up error dialog boxes once a minute, fix it
or kill it.
- Nathan
