[xmonad] Pointer follows focus (with patch)

[Spencer Janssen]

On Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 07:06:50PM +0900, Robert wrote:
> I sometimes get annoyed at having to get my mouse from several screens over 
> to my current window to click on things I'm working on.
>
> I hacked around this by binding a key to Warp.warpToWindow but I'm starting 
> to think there should be the following invariant: the pointer should always 
> be over the focused window. So not only does the focused window follow the 
> pointer as it does now, but the pointer will also follow any window 
> focus.Using the Warp module I got this close to working in my config file.
>
> I had lots of keybindings which are modified to look like this:
>
> windows W.swapUp >> warpToWindow (1%2) (1%2)
>
> What prevents me from getting the invariant I'm aiming for is new or
> destroyed windows.
>
> By adding a new warpToWindow function which takes a window to warp to,
> and using a ManageHook I got quite close to getting it working for new
> windows. I had something that looked like this:
>
> manageWarp = ask >>= \w -> liftX (warpToWindow w (1%2) (1%2)) >> doF id
>
> It worked great for floating windows but not for tiled windows. I think
> the reason is because the hook management code is done before the layout
> code, so the pointer just warps to wherever the window asks to be put
> which becomes wrong as soon as xmonad puts the window into it's proper
> location.
>
> So anyway, I'm starting to think this isn't going to be possible to do
> in my config. But I think it's possibly closer to the right way to
> handle the pointer than what exists now. I've included a patch which
> adds support for a mouseFocusWarpPos config flag to XMonad. It's disabled 
> by default but that could be changed if others like it.
>
> Currently it moves the mouse pointer to a relative position within the
> window the user configures. I'm not entirely happy with this. What might
> be better is for each window to keep track of where the mouse was and go
> back there whenever the window regains focus. But that may be too
> complicated.
>
> Feedback appreciated.
>

Have you considered using logHook?  It is executed after each windowset change,
which should be sufficient.

I'd rather not add this feature to the core.


Cheers,
Spencer Janssen