Gnome vs XFCE - Multiseat & window focus

[Alan Cox]

> Does XFCE work in multiseat mode (or must it too wait for the F17 
> drivers/methodology)

I've run multiple XFCE sessions at once as *different* users on the same
box to different displays. That works - and to be honest - that ought to
work on any desktop.

Trying to do multiple as one user ends in tears.

> Which screen-focus methodology does XFCE use? (Like the older Gnome, or 
> the newer Gnome)

If you mean the window focus policy - its configurable. Mind you most
things in xfce are 8)

> More on Screen Focus:
> The GIS package is NOT a GUI package, but rather a bunch of commands you 
> can string together in BASH-syntax-like scripts that run within the 
> package. I make heavy usage of one command that allows you to position 
> the mouse somewhere on the graphics output screen, and then either 
> click, or touch a key on the keyboard. This command then returns "button 
> X Y" which you can trap, and then do further processing in your script. 
> In other words, I now have a 104-button mouse.

Well sort of, but you are asking for problems if it's just using Xtest
hackery to do this. When you click on a window the focus processing takes
a moment of time and you really should be waiting for the target window
to become mapped before firing input at it.

> In the older Gnomes, when my script requested an input from the graphics 
> locator, the focus would automatically drop to the graphics window, so 
> touching the keyboard instead of clicking the mouse would send the 
> "keypressed-X-Y" to the mouse-input que, and not the keyboard buffer. On 
> the newer Gnomes, this is extremely erratic, and touching the keyboard 
> instead of clicking the mouse sometimes (and not always) puts that key 
> depression into the keyboard buffer (to create later havoc), but hangs 
> my script until the operator manually focusses to the graphic screen and 
> then does the mouse-point-key-depression "click".
> 
> Extremely annoying, so I was wondering if any of you had in-depth 
> knowledge of where this screen-focus issue might arise from

The relevant question is probably how those tools work and how they
should work. You can select a window to be focussed via the X protocol so
you can use command line tools in the script to set focus, at least
assuming the window manager isn't immediately overriding it as is likely
to occur in the non click-to-focus modes that Gnome favours. However
there are ways and means for that too.

If you are using Xfce then you can use "wmctrl" which may be what you
want to actually sort the focussing out. It may also work in Gnome 3.

You might also find Zenity worth looking at for some of this kind of work
where you are nailing GUI and scripts stuff together. It provides a shell
script interface to pop up all sorts of standard gtk dialogues, selectors
etc.

Alan