You must remember the window on top does not necessarily, nor always meant
to, have the input focus.

I myself often input to a window that is mostly obscured, coping from and
modifying text, from the top window.  I would hate being forced to have the
top window always be the one with the focus.   This is also one reason why
I use 'follow mouse' without autoraise type of focus. I don't want to have
to click in a window forcing it to the top, just to be able to type in it.


On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 8:45 AM, Aaron Sloman <[email protected]>
wrote:

>
> Another bit of the story has emerged. I don't know why I did not notice
> this previously. It seems that Firefox is having difficulty working out
> which of its windows is on top!
>
> I have now noticed that when a Firefox window is apparently rejecting
> keyboard input the text sometimes goes into another window, though the
> result may be invisible. It is only visible if the window that grabs focus
> has a text input box e.g. a search box (opened by Ctrl-F in FF), or if I
> had previously clicked in its address bar.
>
> I have not been able to detect a pattern behind the occurrence of this
> 'theft' of focus. I did not notice it previously because with large numbers
> of FF windows in a workspace (most of them minimised) I have to do an
> explicit search to see which window has accepted the input and sometimes
> there's no evidence because the focus was in the main part of the window,
> which does nothing visible with text input. (There may have been a text
> search triggered, but without leaving any visible record.)
>
> Sometimes the evidence is destroyed because I try typing in another window
> which accepts input, but wasn't previously grabbing the text.
>
> I haven't found evidence that text is going to a non-current tab, but I've
> never tried searching through all the tabs.
>
> Anyhow, it looks as if FF can tell which window is on top if I move in and
> out of a workspace, or if I 'open' a short-cut button for editing, but can
> get confused about which is on top if I minimise and maximise windows.
>
> My most recent experiment with a window (WinA) not accepting text is to
> partially cover it wtih another window (WinB) and then click on WinA's
> title bar to raise it. That always seems to put focus back in the raised
> window as expected, when merely opening the window from a minimised state
> does not.
>
> I have no experience writing window manager code, but I would have thought
> that when all windows are rectangular it should be easy to determine
> whether a window is on top of everything else or if the mouse is in a
> portion of the window that is not covered by anything else.
>
> I have workarounds I can live with for now.
>
> Aaron
>
>

Reply via email to