RE: rootless mode and mousing to other windows

["Gerald S. Williams" <gsw at agere dot com>]

Thomas Chadwick wrote:
> Is it as simple as patching XWin to call XSetInputFocus() with a focus 
> argument of "None" when MS Windows informs it that it has lost focus?

That's the type of thing I was hoping for.


Harold L Hunt II wrote:
> I don't think that such interaction between the X Windows window manager 
> and, essentially, the Windows window manager is going to be useful in 
> the end, and it would be overly complicated to implement such an interim 
> solution.

Is that really a fair assessment? For Windows interaction,
I'm only talking about hooking into the focus events. This
would be a useful addition even without rootless mode or
true Windows integration. And it looks like those events
are already hooked in order to deal with keyboard modes.
Which needs some debugging anyway, since X sometimes gets
confused about caps lock (granted I've seen this on Sun
workstations also, but not in a very long time).

If there's any complexity, it's purely on the X side, and
IMO it's something that should be addressed if it hasn't
already. Shouldn't there be a way to tell X that you've
removed focus from it entirely?

> Remember that the ultimate solution is to write calls that make Windows 
> the window manager for our X apps, so your concern would no longer be an 
> issue.
> 
> I urge you to focus on the later solution, rather than trying to send 
> signals between two window managers.

That's a bit too much for me to get involved in right now.
Besides, I'm not really interested in using the "Windows
shell" for managing X-Windows.

Ultimately, what you really want is the ability to go both
ways--let X applications be managed by Windows and let
Windows applications be managed by X window managers (like
LiteStep only allowing X calls all the way down--I think
LiteStep uses GTK or something). Of course, this can get a
bit complicated, especially when the services aren't quite
the same between Windows and X.

But I suspect others with more experience in XFree86 are
already thinking about these things. For now, I wanted to
start small.

-Jerry