Re: [9front] PATCH: click-to-focus in fgui

["José Miguel Sánchez García" <soy.jmi2k@gmail.com>]

My argument against focus-follows-mouse is that it's inconsistent with
how everything works in 9, and IMHO, 9 is about consistency:
"everything is a file" is a cool slogan for "we have a consistent
model to label and locate resources". Rio doesn't have a lot of fancy
features because it aims to be a simple and predictable "rectangle
multiplexer" (as sl says in his webpage). The plumber is a consistent,
system-wide hyperlinking solution.

Wanting focus-follows-mouse is reasonable. Wanting in-tree support for
that in 9, not so much. #ifdefs are pointless, as they are a kind of
sloppy, inline patch that makes the code harder to understand. I think
patching is the way to go. And I'm personally one of those who keep a
collection of patches I apply automatically after each 9front
installation because I love customizing my system (currently I'm
changing colors, menus, keybinds...).

Cheers,
jmi2k

On Sat, Aug 14, 2021 at 2:24 PM Eckard Brauer <eckard.brauer@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> Am Fri, 13 Aug 2021 09:10:47 +0200
> schrieb hiro <23hiro@gmail.com>:
> > of course it's possible! and who cares what's approved?! and we
> > definitely don't approve of #ifdefs, so what is this? some form of
> > trolling?
>
> So far you're free to treat that as whatever you want. As you seem to
> hate the discussion and maybe the participants of it, it's probably of
> much more value if you sit down and write a Plan9 bible with all se
> do's and dont's well ordered by precedence. That way you could have a
> better chance to avoid such discussions for the future and simply
> remind people to "read the fucking guide of dogmas".
>
> regarding the #ifdefs, I completely conform with the idea of mostly
> avoiding them. My suggestion was _never_ to introduce them, but to have
> different choice possible (see the typo, corrected here) "with patch or
> [..] #ifdefs", so either possibility could have been fine, and the
> default behaviour would be kept.
>
> > the tradition on plan9 is to have one single, consistent, sane default
> > whenever possible, so nope... making it user configurable goes against
> > everything we stand for.
>
> OK, but see above with documentation. If the topic is that dogmatically
> overloaded, it _needs_ to be documented in somewhere strictly before
> all user guides and the like. But, hey, why then does rio have a -b
> option or do patches for changing the color scheme exist? It's not
> standard anymore... or why does Plan 9 support keyboard layouts at all
> and doesn't enforce all keyboards of US type? OK, I see some of the
> differences, but you will always hit points where to decide to support
> something formerly unsupported and not covered by any explicit or
> implicit (single-brain?) standard.
>
> Simply think of networking hardware and see what was supported years
> before, what is now, and what probably will be some years later. That's
> btw my personal reason for not actually being able to switch to Plan 9
> for my everyday OS, as I could well live with click-to-focus, if it
> were the only point. That's indeed not a matter of only user
> experience, but of hardware support, but why trying to support many new
> hardware, but not the users, when maybe a large enough group has
> different ideas of usability?
>
> That's a matter of flexibility too, and strictly enfocing the "one and
> only way" everywhere will maybe lead to the most efficient "one man's
> OS". Please come up with real arguments, not "it was everytime this way
> and not different, and so it has to remain". That's really shitty.
> Nobody can resist good reasons and explanations, and if there's a dogma
> left to _never_at_no_single_time_ support something, it has at least to
> be stated somewhere, well visible and clear for every single person.
>
> > if you want to experiment with shitty windowmanagers that get all
> > triggerhappy whenever you look at your mouse sideways there's a lot
> > out there for linux that you could try. please do this first (like
> > most other people have already done here) and feel the suffering
> > before you share more opinions.
>
> As already written, it's _not_ a matter of supporting all "shitty
> windowmanagers" or "but my Windoze has that" or such. As I'm currently
> unable to use Plan 9 as my everyday OS, I'm currently on Linux. I hate
> that and would be willing to switch, if some more things work. And I
> simply exposed an opinion of how I'm working most of the time. If that
> is enough to disqualify me from talking here, please send a note and
> drop me from that list, if not, tell arguments and get it documented at
> where that belongs.
>
> Up to now, I didn't find a strong counterargument against a different
> focus policy, but am still open to know that.
>
> --