Sloppy mouse focus

[rjhorniii]

Enhancement, (hard?)

Windowmaker supports three focus behaviors:

• Click-to-Focus, or manual focus mode. In click-to-focus mode, you explicitly choose the window that should be focused. This is the default mode.
• Focus-Follow-Mouse, or auto-focus mode. In this mode, the focused window is chosen based on the position of the mouse pointer. The window below the mouse pointer is always the focused window.
• Sloppy-Focus, or semi-auto-focus mode. This is similar to the focus-follow-mouse mode, but if you move the pointer from a window to the root window, the window will not loose focus.

I always use sloppy-focus, which still meets the security goals of Wayland, but it a very different behavior. I know it was a problem for quite a while with Wayland-based compositors. The KDE and other ports have found a solution and implemented all three modes.

I rated this (hard?) just because it took so long for other implementations to get it working properly.

[phkaeser]

Scoping hardness: wlmaker toolkit already tracks "pointer focus" of elements.

A potential course of implementation:

• Properly implement handling of "keyboard focus" (also required to support kebyoard navigation in menus) in wlmtk_element_t / wlmtk_container_t.
• Then, extend the virtual methods for "pointer enter" and "pointer leave" to adjust keyboard focus as configured.

That shouldn't be too hard, after all. Caveat: I might be missing something, since I don't follow yet what security concern is about.

[rjhorniii]

good. The security concern was around stealing keyboard and mouse events inappropriately. I've mostly worked either down at device driver or up at application levels. It makes sense to me that having the mouse events and location going to the compositor while the keyboard input goes to the focus window (except for some special function keys) could open up paths for mistakes that reveal keystrokes inappropriately or allow misdirecting them. Things like keyloggers are a concern. I would hope this was fixed in the underlying toolkits but it was a source of problems in early developments. The KDE folks and others did get it all working a while ago. GNOME doesn't believe in "sloppy focus", so they haven't implemented it.

The use that I have all the time is to have a focused window partially underneath an unfocused window on top. I'm reading and using the window on top while typing into the window underneath.

[frankspace]

As someone who is hoping that there will someday be a Wayland substitute for FVWM and that perhaps wlmaker might fill most of the critical-to-me parts of that void, I would just like to chime in and say that I also always use sloppy-focus and would love to see it implemented.