Re: ratpoison gets confused about what is the active frame

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

Hello I'm just a user but I happened to read something in the ratpoison user manual "info ratpoison" the other day, and because I think it would help, at the risk of embarrassing myself for my ignorance, I just wanted to post this:5.4 Rudeness

============

Some programs will attempt to steal the focus without the users
permission.  Not only is this a sign of a lame programmers attempt to
fix a window manager problem in the wrong place, it's just plain rude.
By default ratpoison will honour these rudeness requests, but it doesn't
have to.  Use the rudeness variable to deal with such programs.

 -- Command: set rudeness N
     The rudeness variable lets you decide what windows pop-up
     automatically and when.  This is often useful for those deep hack
     sessions when you absolutely can't be disturbed.

There are two kinds of windows: normal windows (like an xterm) and
     transient windows (generally pop-up dialog boxes).  When a client
     program wants to display a new window it makes a requests to
     ratpoison.  ratpoison then decides whether to grant the request and
     display the window or ignore it.  A client program can also request
     that one of its windows be raised.  You can customize ratpoison to
     either honour these requests (the default operation) or ignore
     them.

     N is a number from 0 to 15.  Each of the four bits determine which
     requests ratpoison grants.

If I've helped, I am happy and probably amazed, if I have embarrased myself for my ignorance, excuse the message.

I love RATPOISON - it's the Windows Manager that was supposed to be - it's so easy to use and it's great having a terminal that runs graphical programs!

Regards,

David Ring

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 3:20 PM Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, 4 Apr 2021 13:11:42 -0700  Ian Hickson  wrote :
> On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 2:41 AM Axel Svensson <mail@axelsvensson.com> wrote:

> When this problem manifests, it doesn't matter where I move the focus. I
> can manually shift the focus around to different frames (using "focusleft",
> "focusdown", etc), and in each case whatever window is in that frame does
> get keyboard focus, and ratpoison does display "Current Frame" in the
> center of that frame, and I can use the window fine. But if I try to change
> which window is in that frame using "prev" or "next", a different frame's
> window changes. Indeed, once this issue triggers, it's always the same
> frame that changes window regardless of how many times I shift the focus
> around.
>
> > Other than that, you say something about an "offending
> > frame". Maybe it's the window that offends you? Badly behaving
> > applications can steal focus sometimes
> >
>
> By "offending frame" I meant the frame that is capturing "prev"/"next"
> ("offending" doesn't mean "causing offense", it means "causing problems").

Yes , that's what Axel meant. So the question is , is there for example
some specific application which always runs on the frame which seems to
get the commands you execute although that frame does not have focus ? Can
you think of anything else which may be common among the frames which
"steal" the commands ?

When the problems arises you may also try to execute the commands (i.e.
prev , next , etc.) from the  ratpoison command line (i.e. after typing
C-t :) to make sure there isn't anything strange happening with your
keybindings.

> Is there any way to log ratpoison's behaviour to a file so that I can see
> if there's anything common in the logs when the problem manifests?

Type from the shell command line
    ratpoison -c sfdump > file

There are a few similar commands like  sdump , fdump .The relevant
commands tend to have "dump" as part of their name.

> In any case I guess the answer to my original question is that this is not
> a known thing. I'll see if I can figure out how to reproduce it.

It has never come up on the list as far as I can remember.