dat@ORVILLE.NAS.NASA.GOV ("David A. Tristram") (07/09/88)
Mark Fichten complains about the key down hack that allows a user to keep input focus when the mouse leaves his window. Also, Mark doesn't like the NeWS paradigm of input to window mouse is over. Well, the behaviour of the window manager is programmed using a bunch of PostScript, and is therefore supposedly easily customizable, hah, but it is not. In fact, the PostScript that handles the input events is so crufty and has so many interdependencies, that it requires a detailed understanding of the entire body of code to make a modification. SGI's manuals even recommend hooking up an ascii terminal if you are going to attempt to program the NeWS server so that you can recover when you lock it up. But enough of this. There is one more bug in the current input focus paradigm that I would like to see fixed: You hold a mouse button down to keep input focus as the mouse leaves a window. Then you release the button. The 'mouse-up' event goes to the window you are now over, not the original one! This bugs me. My application continues to track the mouse because it hasn't heard that I have released the mouse button. Having the event go to the original window would be an elegant solution, but that's not what happens. This is the kind of thing that PostScript and NeWS are supposed to let us get at and fix, but its just not a trivial hack. Also, I have the feeling there are only a few people at SGI who understand the mex PostScript and they are unlikely to read this, or have time to grovel through and fix it. David Tristram