Subject: Re: bug #7269: 24.0.50; opening a file via emacsclient -c <file> moves the mouse cursor to, the top left of the frames buffer.

From: Alain Knaff <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2010 22:25:09 +0100

On 11/13/2010 10:11 PM, Lennart Borgman wrote:
> You answered privately, was that your intention?

No, not really, I accidentally did a "reply" instead of a "reply-all".
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I re-added the bug report in
Cc: now. Hopefully this will work...

> 
> What application do you mean do not grab focus when you ask them to
> open a file? I actually can't remember any. (Except for GIMP which
> seems to have a bug there on w32.)

Why would an application behave differently if I want them to open a
file, than if I just want to create a new document?

Well, in any case, I've never seen any application do this even when
opening a file.

I tried it with openoffice and inkscape right now, and neither of them
did this.

Neither did firefox (when trying to add the URL on the commandline), nor
konqueror.
(thunderbird/firefox steal focus when popping up certain alerts, but not
on open)

Can you name me just one application which steals focus when you launch
it with a file name parameter?

N.B. during my test sometimes the app just happened to pop up its window
under my mouse, so it got focus the "natural" way. However, this choice
of location was by no way deliberate, and didn't happen when retrying it
with a different window disposition.

Alain

> 
> 
> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Alain Knaff <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> On 11/13/2010 09:58 PM, Lennart Borgman wrote:
>>> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 9:13 PM, Alain Knaff <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>>>> Nowadays focus follows mouse doesn't mean that the focus strictly
>>>>> follows the mouse position, it can still be set independent of it.
>>>>
>>>> Even that (ignoring mouse position, and just grabbing focus) would be a
>>>> highly antisocial move. Why can't emacs just leave the mouse and the
>>>> focus alone, like most other apps do, and patiently wait until the user
>>>> gives it focus?
>>>
>>> Of course Emacs should grab focus if the user uses emacsclient to open
>>> a file. Why should not Emacs grab the focus then? AFAICS this is what
>>> the user expects.
>>
>> Did you ever wonder why all the other applications (except thunderbird
>> and firefox in some cases) didn't behave in this way?
>>
>> I'll give you the answer: because most users do NOT expect such rude
>> behavior. We do not want application to steal focus from us, we want
>> them to patiently wait for their turn. Almost all the other apps behave,
>> why can't emacs?
>>
>> Alain
>>