Focus-follows-mouse and pass-window-activation-click

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sat Nov 22 17:33:57 UTC 2003


Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Personally I find it annoying that windows need to be at the top to be
> active. Decades of using RISC OS have got me thoroughly used to being
> able to interact with a window that can be in the middle of a big stack
> without having to bring it to the front. Any part of it I can see, I can
> handle. 

I wonder if it would work out to simply abandon the "active window"
concept in Morphic?  Manipulate SystemWindows just like any others.  If
you click, it will either pass the event or pick up the window,
depending on where you click.  If you close a window, no other window
pops in front of it (this is one that really aggravates students
sometimes, by the way!).  We'd probably want the borders to be larger,
so that you can pick up background windows more easily.

It seems like it would work out pretty well.

It would also be a brutal solution to a different problem, that of
multiple people in Nebraska trying to work in the same project.  Right
now, they have to collectively use just SystemWindow at a time; they
can't each hack in their own simultaneously.


-Lex



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