Bugzilla – Bug 144744
Changing mouse focus policy changes focus stealing policy
Last modified: 2006-01-23 13:29:47 UTC
Using the "smart Placement" policy and "focus under mouse", every new window is placed on top of existing windows. When changing to "focus follows mouse", new windows end up under existing windows. This can be fixed from kcontrol -> Desktop -> Window Behavior -> Advanced -> set Focus Stealing prevention level auf from "Low" to "None". (By the way, wouldn't one rather expect these configuration items in kcontrol instead of behind the menue bar?). Changing the placement behaviour just by changing the mouse focus policy is probably not what a user would expect.
Known upstream (http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80897) and it's also mentioned in description of those focus policies that certain features simply don't work with them (and it's in kcontrol too BTW).
Yes, it's in kcontrol, I found it, I described the path in kcontrol for the bug description, and then I forgot to delete the () sentence. Sorry for the confusion. As for the documentation in the help window, I don't think that I would expect the shown behaviour from that text. I miss the part "Beware! Strange Things Might Happen!" ;-) Anyway, the broken focus policies are known upstream, so probably not an issue here.
The documentation for focus under mouse says that certain features don't work with it, which is what happens. I don't see why that should be called strange things.
> When changing to "focus follows mouse", new windows end up under existing windows. Is this merely a description of focus stealing prevention, or is this the actual problem?
We might either be talking about different documentation or different KDE versions with different documentation. Your quote does not show up in the help text for the Focus Policy (shift-F1 -> click on "Policy"). The KDE Help Center for kcontrol (Revision 3.00.00 from 2002-02-02) has no entry about Focus Policy whatsoever.
Shift+F1: " ... Note that 'Focus under mouse' and 'Focus strictly under mouse' prevent certain features such as the Alt+Tab walk through windows dialog in the KDE mode from working properly."
...which is an entirely different class of problem than "placement of new windows changes". In fact, the text you quote rather states the obvious: if I chose to have the focus under the mouse, something that walks through the windows changing focus (away from the mouse, possibly) is not something I would expect to work.
It says "certain features such as". Do we need to play with words here? Some things, focus stealing prevention included, don't work with focus under mouse. Get over it or try to make it work and send a patch, end of story.