* Ed Lin (edlin...@gmail.com) wrote: > Truth be told, I never used focus "FFP" more than a few times out of > curiosity. I'd be interested why people turn it on and how it helps > them with their workflow. > > In GNOME there are two relevant settings. One immediately focuses the > window beneath the pointer. Additionally you can make the window rise > after a given time interval. (See System Settings -> Windows).
I don't use auto-rise, and I use sloppy focus - i.e. when the pointer goes into a window it gets focus, but when it leaves a window it doesn't lose it until it goes into another one. My normal mode of working is a lot of terminals, and a web browser and maybe a few IRC or the like, PDF viewers as well from time to time. I make heavy use of virtual desktops (typically a 3x3 grid). I've used sloppy or focus-follows for a long long time; I think back to fvwm days or earlier on a Sun at Uni. Most of my windows mostly don't overlap. There are exceptions however; I'll pull up another terminal occasionally to do something; or I'll be working on one virtual desktop and set a window to all desktops while I want to work on it side by side with something else. Another case is I might be doing some calculations on the data in one window, I might pop up a small terminal (say 80x5), force it always-on-top and run bc in it (yeh, old school I know - but I can't find a graphical calc that suits all the simple stuff I do and doesn't take more work). > To me the latter doesn't really make sense, raise on click will be > faster except when you set it to "0.0" in which case, especially on a > busy desktop it will get in your way. > Without the rise feature enabled you only get focus which doesn't help > you with mouse interaction if the desired controls are behind another > window. I guess it could make sense for keyboard shortcuts but then > you'd have your hands on the keyboard and could use even faster > keyboard combos to activate the desired window. OK, but then you have to somehow designate windows to key bindings and remember which is which; that's easy if you always have the same layout, but not if your layout varies a lot; where as just flicking the mouse to the left into the window that's on the left is easy - and with sloppy you don't have to be accurate to do that; I'll also sometimes leave a bit of space between windows to make that easier. > On really busy workstations you probably don't have all windows > visible all the times so the new Unity spread view should increase the > efficiency even if ffp was completely removed. Ah but that's why I use virtual desktops, so most windows are visible most of the time in a given desktop. > I guess this leaves tiling layouts where all windows are visible all > the times. In this case all I can say: You really should use a realy > tiling WM and if you really care about speed and efficiency best thing > you could do is throw out your mouse and learn the keyboard controls. Yeuch tiling; feels like a straight jacket! Dave -- -----Open up your eyes, open up your mind, open up your code ------- / Dr. David Alan Gilbert | Running GNU/Linux | Happy \ \ gro.gilbert @ treblig.org | | In Hex / \ _________________________|_____ http://www.treblig.org |_______/ _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp