Subject: Re: commit -- focus change
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Feb 02 2001 - 20:17:19 CST
At 05:33 PM 2/2/01 -0800, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
>(oh no! now the abisource folks are BAAACCK, and i'll get punished for
>my selfish design changes)
:-) Nope. Don't consider me back until I have time to hack. And even
then, I try to avoid CVS commit wars. :-)
>I read your posts, and disagree with their selection handling
>proposition. It does seem sensible to me to avoid blinking the cursor
>when the frame is not what has input focus (see #1099), but I do not
>quite understand the logic behind hiding the selection when the window
>is not focused. I have never seen another X application do this.
Yeah, my original proposal was just to mimic the usual Windows convention,
in hopes that this'd prompt a lively discussion of the merits of other
platform-specific focus models. (Break out your GUI guidelines, folks!)
IIRC, the original behavior was to *always* draw selections and blinking
cursors in *all* Abi frames simultaneously, which is ridiculous.
I'm still interested in a specific proposal from you. For example,
- What's your desired behavior when three Abi windows are up and none of
them have the focus: should they all have that dimmed selection?
- What if one does have the focus? Still dim the others?
Without having seen it in action, answering Yes to both sounds reasonable,
so long as it doesn't massively violate GUI guidelines on one of our
supported platforms. If so, feel free to implement the necessary logic to
draw dimmed selections for AV_FOCUS_NEARBY (or whatever we're calling it
these days), so we can all see how it feels.
However, having all three draw the full-bore selection is just plain wrong.
There's not a strong enough visual distinction to help church secretaries,
et al, quickly recognize which window has the focus.
>If I
>use a selection to "highlight" something as a crude way of marking my
>place of something I'm reading, then switch to another window and try
>to work off the text I had hilighted in the AbiWord window, I can't
>unless I find it again!
>
>Window managers do a good job of indicating which window has focus, and
>I think it's just wrong to make things of possible value to the user
>(such as selections) just disappear when the window loses input focus.
Fine, but that's an X-specific argument. What do users of other GUIs
expect? I still believe we can come up with a good XP solution here.
Paul,
pesky pixel-pusher
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