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#11
My feeling is that while this may have been technically allowed by the spec (I
don't know, I haven't read the spec) it definitely is the case that many very
long-standing programs are broken by this so it was not a good idea. It is
important to adhere to informal accepted practises as well as formal standards.

I understand that Nokia did this for reasonable engineering reasons. It saves
power on mobile devices. And apparently they felt that the majority of users
would use apps specifically designed and compiled for the device. But there is
a large community of users who have been using the 770, N800, and N810 as a
Linux computer and wish to continue using the N900 and future devices as such
running standard Linux/Unix apps either ported to run natively in maemo, run
in a chroot, or run remotely over X. And it is not reasonable to modify and
recompile the huge base of Linux/Unix code to be compatible with the N900.

I hope Nokia patches this, at least to make it a user-configurable option. In
the short term, I almost have working a workaround, a shell script that runs
in the background, detecting when windows get exposed and calling
XSetInputFocus() on them. It works but is currently power hungry and specific
to emacs. I'm working on making it more power efficient and more general. I'll
post it when I'm done.
 

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#12
For the specific case of Emacs, note that emacs23-gtk seems to work just fine.

Note, though, that you may have a hard time using Emacs if you can't press "meta" (either alt or escape).
 
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#13
qobi: what's with the weird formatting of your post? It looks like you have hard line breaks in all the wrong places; very strange looking...

A small app that would fix broken windows would be sufficient for me...
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Posts: 77 | Thanked: 63 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#14
Originally Posted by josh View Post
For the specific case of Emacs, note that emacs23-gtk seems to work just fine.
Tried that but for some reason the window size is set incorrectly and the minibuffer is off the botton of the screen. This doesn't happen with
emacs23-lucid. More generally, the gtk version seems broken even on i686. It doesn't correctly honor -geometry, -iconic, and -xrm requests while the lucid version does. So you can't make a .xsession or .twmrc file that sets up emacs windows/icons at fixed places on your desktop.

Originally Posted by josh View Post
Note, though, that you may have a hard time using Emacs if you can't press "meta" (either alt or escape).
You can rebind keys. Or put them in menus. Or use a bluetooth keyboard once the xkb-data issue is resolved. For the past two years I have used Emacs, LaTeX, and Scheme->C on my N810 with a bluetooth keyboard almost daily.
 
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#15
tbh I think that this issue is not exactly one of the biggest anoyances when using non-hildon apps under the Maemo WM...

Instead of a daemon, I'd think of a LD_PRELOAD library that handles XMapWindow.
 

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#16
Originally Posted by javispedro View Post
tbh I think that this issue is not exactly one of the biggest anoyances when using non-hildon apps under the Maemo WM...

Instead of a daemon, I'd think of a LD_PRELOAD library that handles XMapWindow.
Here's why it is such a big deal for me:

When I realised how difficult it was to use non-Hildon apps under Matchbox2, I tried to use my old trick of using Xephyr to make a secondary WM on :1 that behaves more like a desktop environment.

But, unfortunately, the Xephyr nested X-server suffers from either the same bug or a very similar one. So you can't type in any application running in the Xephyr session. I asked if someone could please port it for me, but nobody responded.


So I really can't get away from this frustrating WM...
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#17
Originally Posted by javispedro View Post
tbh I think that this issue is not exactly one of the biggest anoyances when using non-hildon apps under the Maemo WM...
How can you even use an app that requires but does not get keyboard focus?
That must make it one of the biggest annoyances.

Originally Posted by javispedro View Post
Instead of a daemon, I'd think of a LD_PRELOAD library that handles XMapWindow.
Except that you need to reissue XSetInputFocus each time a window is reexposed after being iconified/minimized.
 
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#18
sorry to butt in on this topic, but is this the reason i can't persuade citrix, running under the excellent easy debian, to accept keystrokes?
 
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#19
rcs1000: I'm willing to bet that it is your problem...
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#20
The fact that nearly every dialog is unusable is a much bigger problem IMHO.

Originally Posted by qobi View Post
Except that you need to reissue XSetInputFocus each time a window is reexposed after being iconified/minimized.
You don't XSetInputFocus (which is a hack) but rather fix the WM_HINTS, which is the real issue here (and not the window manager). If you want examples please search my posts, qwerty's patch to xev, or the multiple debian bug reports opened about the issue (in apps/toolkits).

Last edited by javispedro; 2009-12-15 at 00:05.
 

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