FVWM: extra windows lowered when main window lowered; how to restore old behavior?fvwm

From: Daniel Barclay <dsb_at_smart.net>
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 23:10:25 -0500

Somewhere between the FVWM versions in Debian GNU/Linux versions slink and woody, FVWM developed the annoying habit of lowering and raising
windows beyond the one I requested it to lower or raise.

For example, in PilotManager, when I start a synchronization operation,
PilotManager pops up a small status window. I want to lower the main
window but leave the small status window visible (i.e., not lower it).
I used to be able to do that just fine, but now when I try to lower the
main window, FVWM apparently lowers the small status window also.

(I don't know for sure that this is FVWM, but several different
applications' windows seem to have changed this behavior when I upgraded
from Debian slink to Debian woody, so it seems to be FVWM.)

How do I turn off this excessive lowering (and similar raising)?



(By the way, why was this changed? The point of having separate windows
is (well, sometimes) to be able to treat them separately.

I can understand the use of raising a modal windows associated with a
main window when that main window is raised. (You need to know about
the modal window to finish with it to be able to do anything with the
main window.) But unless a window manager can know whether a transient
window is modal or not, it seems that its the windowing toolkit that
should be doing that raising.

Similarly, I can understand the use of raising a non-modal transient
window (if that's the correct use of "transient") when raising the main
window. (In Netscape, when you raise a main window, any Find (find in
page) window associated with that main window gets raised too, and that
seems to work pretty logically. However, I think Netscape already
implements that logic, since it has worked that way for a while.)

However, I don't see the logic behind lowering windows beyond the
requested window. If you lower a main window, there's no need to
lower associated windows; if you lower the associated windows, there's
no need to lower the main window. Therefore, if the user lowers a
window, the window manager probably shouldn't decide to start lowering
others.

Well, I'm pretty sure my favorite window manager is configurable enough
for me to have my preferred behavior and everyone else to have theirs,
but I am curious about the logic for the change (and wonder if it
should be the default (assuming it's not the Debian packager who changed
the behavior--that has happened before).)


Thanks,
Daniel
-- 
Daniel Barclay
dsb_at_smart.net
--
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Received on Sun Jan 12 2003 - 22:11:30 GMT

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