Re: Octave plot window input focus

[John W. Eaton]

On  4-Feb-2010, Michael Godfrey wrote:

| On 02/03/2010 10:22 PM, Michael D Godfrey wrote:
| > On 02/03/2010 10:07 PM, Shai Ayal wrote:
| >> It's certainly not advisable to make direct X11 calls in octave which
| >> is supposed to run on windows ....
| >>
| >> I'm not sure if you can return the focus to the octave window in
| >> general, since the octave process usually does not "own" the windows
| >> in which the command line lives -- this is just some random terminal.
| >> In an IDE (like matlab's), where the terminal&  the figure window
| >> belong to the same process, managing these focus switches would be
| >> trivial.
| >>
| >> If you run matlab w/o an IDE, from a terminal, will it still switch
| >> focus from the figure to the terminal?
| >>
| >> Shai
| >>    
| > I tried matlab -nodesktop.  Focus goes to plot window. Ugh.
| >
| > Michael
| >
| The best I can think of now is a separate X11 program which monitors 
| events on the
| command window and grabs focus back whenever it is moved by a window create
| event.  It may be a bit tricky to distinguish intended moves (by mouse 
| click for example).
| This program could be (optionally) started when octave is started in an 
| X11 environment.
| 
| Any better ideas?

I think this focus thing is a function of the window manager, at least
unless the application overrides the window manager choice.

For example, I'm using Metacity on a Debian system and by default it
appears to give the focus to newly opened windows.  But I found that
changing the "focus_new_windows" parameter from "smart" to "strict"
causes it to not give the focus to new windows automatically.  To
change this setting, I had to run gconf-editor, select
apps->metacity->general and then changne the "focus_new_windows"
option.

This change solves my problem with Octave and a new gnuplot or fltk
window grabbing the focus from my command window.

jwe