Raise windows on focus - change setting?

Still finding my feet with budgie :grinning:

I do like the option to have the focus follow my mouse pointer. And I can see “Enable window focus change on mouse enter and leave”.

But it also forces the focused window to come to the front as if I have clicked it. Is there a way to turn that off please? I often work with overlapping windows, and they start dancing forward while my mouse is on its way to the actual one I want. :slight_smile:

Umm… I don’t understand. Follow focus does just that … ensures the window your cursor is over is raised and has focus.

Anyway … technically all that option does is turn on the follow focus option in the GNOME window manager called mutter.

So what you are seeing is the follow focus implementation by the GNOME devs.

If I remind correctly the follow focus done through compiz offered a delay setting before raising.

Really? Maybe a useful suggestion to the mutter devs on gitlab

Who will dare suggesting gnome dev’s to add a feature ?

But yes the delay setting was available through Compiz Config Settings Management, typically the kind of UI gnome dev’s try to avoid ( and it’s rather understandable ).

Typically gnome devs like to hide things away in gsettings. Then something like gnome tweaks would expose the setting

Or maybe it’s already there ?
org.gnome.mutter focus-change-on-pointer-rest false
what happens if set to true ?

Sounds interesting. Does the dconf description help here for that key?

Yes it helps :

Si défini à true et que le mode de focus est soit « sloppy » ou « souris », alors le focus ne sera pas changé immédiatement en passant sur une fenêtre, mais seulement après que le pointeur s’arrête.

If set to true and if focus-mode is either « sloppy » or « mouse » then focus won’t be raised immediately on window hovering, but only after pointer rests.

Side note, focus appears in many places in dconf :

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I’m not making a feature request, just showing that fine control over behaviours is something I find very appealing.

I find that having windows not raising unless I specifically click in the toolbar is very desirable for the way I work. This is possible in XFCE. I like it because the keyboard follows focus too, and often I will want to type in a window that I want to be my keyboard focus, but not my “human” focus. I just want it to get on with things in the background. Chatting while watching a vid. Screen sharing a window with lockdown buddies while using other apps to drive the session. Day to day working where I might have 2 or 3 term windows, etc.

Again, not a feature request, just sharing.

Attached is a gif of this control in XFCE, where I run through a few scenarios. This first is the one I’m referring to. The rest show the delay settings for interest, which I don’t use that much.

Feature requests like this needs to be made here

It’s not exactly the same but have you tried the focus-change-on-pointer-rest ?

You also may play with org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences raise-on-click :

The default, true, indicates that a window will be raised whenever its client area or its frame is clicked. Setting this to false means that a window will not be raised if it is clicked on the client area. To raise it, one can click anywhere in the window’s frame, or Super-click on any part of the window. This mode is useful if one uses many overlapping windows.

*Forget about org.cinnamon.desktop.wm.preferences raise-on-click where you can read that very funny description : *

Setting this option to false can lead to buggy behavior, so users are strongly discouraged from changing it from the default of true. Many actions (e.g. clicking in the client area, moving or resizing the window) normally raise the window as a side-effect. Setting this option to false, which is strongly discouraged, will decouple raising from other user actions, and ignore raise requests generated by applications. See Bug 445447 – Application-induced window raise fails when raise_on_click off. Even when this option is false, windows can still be raised by an alt-left-click anywhere on the window, a normal click on the window decorations, or by special messages from pagers, such as activation requests from tasklist applets. This option is currently disabled in click-to-focus mode. Note that the list of ways to raise windows when raise-on-click is false does not include programmatic requests from applications to raise windows; such requests will be ignored regardless of the reason for the request. If you are an application developer and have a user complaining that your application does not work with this setting disabled, tell them it is -their- fault for breaking their window manager and that they need to change this option back to true or live with the “bug” they requested.

I assume ↑ this one has no effect in UbuntuBudgie.

@fossfreedom isn’t it weird there are some kinds of duplicates regarding windows management ( focus, raise… ) between org.gnome.mutter and org.cinnamon.desktop.wm ?

If you look at the history of the two projects I think it makes sense. Cinnamon forked mutter at a very early stage a few years ago. They haven’t had the man power to bring up their version to resolve all these issues.

GNOME devs have been continually evolving their window manager and in this area they have tidied things up to be workable.

Ok. What I don’t understand is why those org.cinnamon.desktop.wm are in dconf-editor in UbuntuBudgie if they are not relevant ( Budgie uses mutter as wm, right ? ).

It’s because those schemas are strangely delivered as part of nemo … not the cinnamon window manager. Yes… agree … very odd.

It’s traditional “sloppy-focus” without “auto-raise”
To enable, use “Gnome Tweaks”, under “windows” not “Mouse”