design TODO -- handle focus properly

Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Thu, 21 Oct 1999 11:15:13 -0700


Shaw's alluded to this already, but AbiWord currently has a pretty
brain-damaged notion of focus. Essentially, the current UI almost always
behaves as if the document has focus.

For example, whether the document "really" has focus or not, you always see
the following behaviors:

- the cursor blinks
- the selection draws

If you have multiple documents open, they all do this simultaneously, even
if *none* of them have the focus. (One example of this is when keyboard
focus has moved to a toolbar widget.)

Instead, we should probably switch to a paradigm where those indications
correspond more closely with where the keyboard events are really going.

However, getting this to Just Work may require a fair amount of design time.
We'll need a single XP mechanism for handling focus-related drawing changes,
and IIRC the underlying platform-specific focus-handling mechanisms are by
no means symmetric.

At some point, we'll need to have someone work through these issues, but
it's probably not just a matter of a few little tweaks here or there. This
is the kind of hard-core GUI hacking which requires more thought than code.

Just a friendly warning to the ambitious. :-)

Paul



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