Handle notifications better with focus follows mouse / Issue 167

[jlsantiago0]

Seems to be working well and the configuration through the UI is also working.

[eteran]

Reviewing old PRs and issues :-)

So this has been sitting idle for about a year, and I'm actually prepping to do a "release" soon... what do you think the state of this PR is? generally functioning as desired and ready to merge? Or needs tweaking?

[anjohnson]

I haven't actually tried it, but the behavior it describes looks like something that I would like to be able to select as I use focus-follow-mouse.

[jlsantiago0]

I used this for a couple months and was happy with the results.

I ended up adding similar functionality to the Motif Nedit application and have been using that ever since. Mostly because of the unfortunate large set of dependencies that are brought in by Qt. Makes it hard to have an nedit-ng build that you can move around to different distros and have to keep rebuilding it on different distros with various degrees of success/difficulty.

Not the fault of nedit-ng, guess this is just a general problem with most Qt applications. In particular when i need it on an older distro. I can build the Motif versions of Nedit on an old distro container like CentOS5 or Ubuntu12/14 and just run the binaries anywhere. So that is what drove that decision.

I find this feature useful, because i tend to use nedit with a bunch of different nedit windows open and often overlapping so that i can type in to them without necessarily raising them. And sometimes some of the files i may have opened up, may have changed (maybe one of them is a log from a running program i am currently debugging and modifying). I dont want the log file raising itself and grabbing my attention, unnecessarily distracting me from what i am doing just because the log has changed. I want nedit to recognize that the file has changed, but not trigger the file has changed dialog until i try to type into it or i intentionally raise the window myself.

If this seems confusing, I have, since i worked under the CDE environment in the early 90s, used the DE Focus Follow Mouse. In this mode, any window or part of a window that the mouse is over has the keyboard focus. The DE does not raise the window when it is given focus unless you click the the mouse on the window. So it is possible to have a bunch of overlapping windows scattered on your desktop. You can move the mouse over the window and type in that window. And if that window happens to be behind other windows, it will stay that way and not be raised, but you can still type into that window.

I hope this feature work that i added will also be useful to others as well. It is currently implemented with ability to enable/disable from the configuration UI. So it should be no risk even if it does not work the way someone might want it too. I dont think it breaks anything. And it is currently an opt-in only mode.

Thank you for considering my PR.