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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

twm is the best, but it's annoying that modern programs are not compatible with mouse focus (meaning whatever the mouse is pointing at is the focus for input). We've definitely given up interface speed in exchange for conformity.

I used to set it up without title bars. You had to know my personal shortcuts to use my desktop.

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What do you mean? I have been using focus-follows-mouse since the late 1990s and have never noticed a program that was incompatible with it.

It's usually some commercial programs that have issues.. I was going to try it and give a more specific answer, but Ubuntu does not let me run twm. I get a blank screen when I log in with twm selected.

You very likely have twm running and no other programs. Clicking on the empty desktop ought to get you a menu.

So this is what's happening, but it's still messed up. The menus appear, but don't disappear, so pretty soon I have 20 menus all over the screen. Also no mouse pointer until I click. Also, the menu entries don't do anything (yes, I'm holding until the entry is selected, then releasing).

Anyway I tried it in vnc4server, where it does work, though you have to start it with LANG=C. But now I can't find any programs that are not working.. I'll have to use it for a while.

Focus follows mouse is a must have for me, to really make it work it needs to be paired with "don't raise on click".

The next step in the progression to find a more usable desktop configuration is to admit that overlapping windows don't do much for you and go full tiling mode. I will admit of these three options tiling mode has the most chance to break applications. So depending on what applications you use most it may not be for you.

I never had problems wir Focus follows mouse in XWindow and like the feature very much.

I've even used a program that did the same for Windows (that sometimes had issues as the windows programs didn't expect that the activ window was not on top). I didn't remember the name of the program but this [1] sounds close.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/954021/how-do-you-enable-foc...

I tried using focus-follows-mouse on mac (yabai allows this even without disabling SIP)... it wasn't a good experience because the menu bar is always at the top, so I was always traversing over several other apps to get to the menu bar... and I'd forget to mouse back to the app I was working in when I was done menu-ing.

I use focus-follows-mouse (in fvwm), and the only app I can recall has any problem is Steam, in which the menus disappear if the mouse goes outside the steam window (or perhaps outside the menu, don't remember the details).

> I used to set it up without title bars. You had to know my personal shortcuts to use my desktop.

That's my setup in XFCE. Actually I just need two shortcuts: Alt-F4 and Alt-F9 to minify or close a window. And Alt to move the windows.

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