The official LQ poll series continues. This time we want to know: Which Mouse Focus Behavior do you Prefer in Linux?

Umm, you lost me there and I had to refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(computing). Learned something about focus there but I never had anything other than "click with autoraise" -> I started with SuSE 6.2(6.3?) and KDE some time in 2000 I think...

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What does "sloppy" mean? I always use activation on mouse contact and raise on click. Never heard about sloppy. Edit: Oops, I should have read the other post. I indeed USE sloppy focus :-) How can I enter a line break here?

I have no idea what the question is and am totally confused by the set of answer choices.

@zaivala Use the link in post #2.

Sloppy is when you put the mouse pointer into a frame to get focus, click is when you click in a frame to get focus, focus means that that frame will take mouse &/or keyboard attention. Hope that helps.

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I also had to review the Wikipedia article to (try to) understand the differences, even though I thought I was familiar with most focus policies. I am still confused on these points:

* I'm not clear on what autoraise is for the click to focus policy. I presume that the autoraise being referred to is after the click, and that there is no click to focus policy without autoraise. Is there? (I mean, is there some mouse policy where you can click in an exposed portion of a window, the focus is moved there, but the hidden part of the window is not "raised"?)

* I wasn't really aware of what is described as sloppy focus, so after reading the article I tested my (Debian Wheezy) system, and it turns out that the policy is actually sloppy focus (or a combination of that and click to focus). The thing is, I never used the sloppy focus feature, and don't expect it to be useful, so I entered my vote for click with autoraise.

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Lol I don't see "The default that ships with your distro" I don't think I ever changed it...So therefore I use click with auto raise.

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I've been using follow focus since I used CDE on Solaris. Now I use i3 on Debian, but still use follow focus.

I have read the wikipedia article and according to my understanding, "Sloppy" should be the default for Ubuntu/Linux Mint/Ubuntu MATE!

Not knowing these categorisations, I always was a huge fan of the Ubuntu (Linux in general?) handling of the focus policy, compared to Windows. It is so smart to being able to scroll EVERYWHERE (e. g. to lookup information) without having to dump-click-focus the target window (which may overlap unwanted space then).

I assume that most of the people voted wrong here, cause of misunderstanding these categorisations; maybe me as well, if my understanding (as explained above) was incorrect...

I would interpret "focus" as "receiving keyboard input", and while it's been a while since I've been on Ubuntu, I do recall "Click with Auto-raise" being the default there.

Sending scroll-wheel input to the moused-over window is fantastic, and I'm quite happy that Windows 10 (yay enterprises) has this as a default as well. That said, Win 10 is still a "Click with Auto-raise", even though mouse-wheel input follows the cursor.

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Click to raise, with one notable exception:

In XFCE, set it to click to raise as usual, but then go into Window Manager Tweaks -> Accessibility and then uncheck "Raise windows when any mouse button is pressed". This lets one scroll a window without raising it, which is just one of those little things that makes all the difference in the world. Windows doesn't do this, and I have no idea how to do it there, but it's a critical feature. I think this is the default in other DEs too.

I had to consult Wikipedia to find what "sloppy" was, and to discover that "mouse" presumably means "focus follows pointer".

Actually, although I chose click with autoraise, it's not a facility I often use: normally I swap focus with Alt-Tab.

I votes "Mouse with auto-raise" because that is what I use most, unless Sloppy with auto-raise is available. So in hindsight, I voted wrong, but it doesn't matter that much.

What I hate though is when the WM accepts input on a random window when the last active window closed and the mouse is not over something that can be clicked (other than the desktop itself).

I'm indifferent between mouse & sloppy, but I hate click and I *really* hate auto-raise. Come on, this is a linux forum. Doesn't anyone ever want to temporarily type in a partially/mostly obscured (e.g. except for the bottom few rows) terminal window without forcing it to raise over some other application window?

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