The lack of UI for strict focus-follows-mouse in RedHat's GNOME2 desktop has been bugging me for a
while. I even tried switching to KDE,
except the large mouse cursors preference didn't work there.
Anyway, I finally discovered that metacity (the GNOME 2 window
manager) does have strict focus-follows-mouse. There's just no
UI for the preference. All you have to do is type:
"gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode mouse --type=string".
I guess if these things still happen in the RedHat 9 release (I'm
currently running the beta), I'll have a bit of bug filing to do. It
seems somewhat pointless to file bugs on a beta when you know the bits
of the release are already
final. There's also that nasty SYSFONT bug in
/etc/profile.d/lang.csh. And killing the X server too many times seems to make
the system crash horribly. Oh, and of course the postcmd
hack below doesn't get along with less (in particular,
lesspipe.sh) in the beta, either. OK, no more notes to
myself on what bugs to file...
I'm one of those tcsh users who's always jealous of the
way bash, on recent RedHat systems (thanks to stuff they
put in /etc/bashrc) shows the directory in the window
title. I finally bothered to figure out how bash does what
it does, which lead easily to how to do the equivalent in
tcsh (whose man page gives something similar, but not quite
right):
if ( $?term ) then
if ( $term == xterm ) then
alias precmd 'echo -n "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}:`echo $PWD | sed -e"s,^$HOME,~,"`\007"'
alias postcmd "echo -n '\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}:\!#'; echo -n '\007'"
endif
endif
This has to run in interactive shells only.
Update (evening): I swapped (above) the use of '
and " in postcmd so that it works correctly
with commands containing *, etc.
It's March now, and we're beginning to get some warm weather. But it
will probably snow again soon enough. I've got a bit of a cold, which
isn't surprising considering all the people from different parts of the
world I met at the W3C technical plenary (even though I only stayed for
the 3 days of the CSS working group meeting).
Plans for Mozilla: the main things I want to do for 1.4 are in the
style system, not layout. I want to clean up the
nsCSSDeclaration code and data structures (and fix some other
problems that depend on that), move towards
style rule immutability to solve a bunch of dynamic change problems
and simplify the dynamic change code, and land a patch I've had
around for months and the cleanup that follows. None of that should
be too destabilizing or risk any problems in 1.4.
Then once the tree closes for 1.4 I think it will be time to start
working on major layout cleanups (like making shrink wrapping work a
reasonable way).
I should probably be saying this in the newsgroups. Having our
design plans only discussed in bugs, on IRC, and in blogs creates a high
barrier to entry for people interested in getting involved in Mozilla's
layout engine. Having discussion like this on the newsgroups was one of
the things that allowed me to learn about Mozilla.
