Axis events to keyboard focus (Re: Input and games.)

[Todd Showalter]

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 9:06 PM, Vincent Povirk <madewokherd at gmail.com> wrote:

> A compositor could just drop events that aren't over a focused window,
> and it would solve Todd's problem, unless he's also expecting to be
> able to scroll things without hovering over them.

    My problem is that I expect one of two cases:

1) all focus follows the pointer (this is what I prefer)

2) click to focus

    I can live with either, though I vastly prefer
focus-follows-pointer.  The problem in OSX is that it's this broken
mushing of the two systems together; scroll wheel focus follows the
pointer, keyboard is click-to-focus.

    Because I interact with document browsers (ie: web browsers, pdf
readers) mostly via the scroll wheel, I often get into a case where I
launch a document browser from somewhere else (IRC, a terminal,
emacs...) and the launching window retains keyboard focus, but I've
got scrollwheel focus on the document browser.  When I hit the
close-tab or close-window hotkey, it gets routed to the *launching*
window (IRC or whatever) because *keyboard* focus never left that
window.  So the wrong window closes, and I'm annoyed at my computer
for doing something stupid.

    As the user, my subconscious expectation is that the hotkey will
be sent to the window with which I've been interacting, which is
precisely what doesn't happen.  Instead, it may well go to a window I
haven't interacted with for several minutes, or possibly even longer.

    This gets particularly nasty if you walk away from the computer
for a while and then come back.  You wind up having to stop and stare
at the window decorations and the system menu to determine which
window has real focus.  Or you forget, and close the wrong window.
I've thrown my hands up and set absolutely everything in OSX that I
can to confirm-on-close, because otherwise I get burned too often.

    I'm dubious about any focus model that requires me to remember
that window A has one kind of focus, and window B has another
simultaneously.  It inevitably leads to pilot error.

                                       Todd.

--
 Todd Showalter, President,
 Electron Jump Games, Inc.