Re: [xmonad] Emacs frame with STRUT+DOCK doesn't get keyboard focus

2011/6/7 Ted Zlatanov :

On Tue, 7 Jun 2011 13:07:21 -0400 Brandon Allbery wrote: BA> 2011/6/7 Ted Zlatanov :

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and pinned to a window edge.  So far so good.  But XMonad doesn't give it the keyboard focus; I can only use the mouse in that frame.  That's a problem since Emacs is mostly keyboard-driven, so it's hard to do much in that frame.

BA> Most of the dock management stuff does a doIgnore on windows, which BA> means they'll never receive keyboard focus.  You'll find more flexible BA> code in XMonad.Hooks.ManageHelpers for things like this; just leave BA> off the doIgnore part.

OK, so it's not a bug?  It seems unreasonable to block docks from getting the keyboard focus.  Why does XMonad do it and others don't?

I suspect it's mostly a matter of cargo cult coding: people blindly copying code without really understanding what it does. The author of ManageHelpers understood well enough to include other possibilities.

Looking at the docs for XMonad.Hooks.ManageHelpers didn't help me much (I don't know the XMonad internals and configuration well at all).

Hrm. Have had too many things going on of late and apparently misremembered; I had been working on extended freedesktop.org support and thought I'd discovered that I was reinventing parts of ManageHelpers. This is from my own package, which is on hold at the moment:

manageUtility :: ManageHook manageUtility = ask >>= \win -> liftX (withDisplay $ \dpy -> io $ raiseWindow dpy win) >> doFloat

This replaces the "manageDocks" in manageHook, but you still need the rest of the ManageDocks machinery to handle the struts.