Comment 32 for bug 674138

Hi everyone. I've decided to take some initiative to solve the long list of problems with focus follows mouse in Unity. With this aim, I have created a focus follows mouse team and a PPA to host patched versions of Oneiric packages.

I have looked for an existing effort but not found anything. Please let me know if there is something I should be aware of. Please also let me know if there is some other kind of group I should create to help further this aim.

The team page can be accessed here:

https://launchpad.net/~focus-follows-mouse

Anyone who is interested in helping out with anything relating to focus-follows mouse in unity, please join the team and its mailing list.

I'm posting to this bug for two reasons. Firstly there are a lot of subscribers and it is a good way to look for members for my new team. And secondly, of course, I'd like to do something about this bug and provide updated packages in the team's PPA.

So, suggestions are welcome on what I/we need to do here. My personal view is that disabling the global menu should be easy. I have disabled it myself and this works pretty well for me.

I'd also like to try and implement one or some of the suggestions here for keeping it. From skimming this thread I see the following solutions:

- Show the menu for the highest window (patch included). I don't really like this because it kind of defeats the point of focus-follows mouse. Do other people like this solution?

- Show the menu for the last window to be clicked in. This sounds interesting but I wonder how it would work in practice. It also seems quite close to the way the global menu is designed to be used. I wonder quite how well it would work in practice. I think a certain amount of indication would be needed to make it clear what app has the menu focus. I also think that instead of all clicks changing the menu that we could experiment with other idea.

- Detect a movement directly to the menu and prevent it from changing. This is also interesting, although possibly tricky to implement correctly. If it worked it could be an extremely intuitive solution. That said, intuitive solutions aren't necessarily what people who use focus-follow mouse use. Rather they are looking for the most efficient solution, and this one could get annoying.

If I get some specific feedback with regards to these solutions then I'll put some work in and upload some packages to my PPA.