Linux Mint Forums

Under Mint 13, and before, I could run these commands to get the focus to work the way "X" developers have forever intended it to be, instead of something akin to a broken Windows Desktop, like every other post for Mint 14 has wanted.
That worked like magic, instantly correcting what has been for decades, "broken" functionality.

I REALLY need to have that back. There's nothing so frustrating as having the focus follow my mouse, but have the newly focused window NOT raise to the top. I'm typing in a terminal window, and my cursor and typed text disappears behind the previously focused window. Very annoying.

Can Anyone Help?!

Please?

Thank You To Someone With An Answer They Know Works. (Sorry for seeming harsh, but I've read so many posts in several other threads that seem to be what I'm looking for, only to find that the posters; all of them, want the functionality I'm seeing now. Really, it's not that hard to break it so it works wrong, like no "Auto Raise".)

I've found this online: http://gheex.com/?p=15

and I also see the single comment lamenting that it doesn't work in Cinnamon 1.5 and I'm on 1.6.7. Also, on that page, it says to put a setting in compiz-1, but there isn't any creature in the gconf hierarchy.

So, back to the drawing board. If I find anything, I'll be posting it here, and hopefully someone might find a solution first because I have to research this type of stuff at work, so I just wanna do my own development, and autoraise should be 400ms, not go away.

I guess there are not developers on the forums... I haven't found a solution, but then I haven't had much time to look. I have 2 jobs, both in I.T. and only one actually pays me for my time. I do consulting for I.T. as well, but only have one customer left (as an I.T. consultant, if I do my job right, the customer doesn't need me any more, or at least not very much).

I really would appreciate someone with an answer to auto-raise for sloppy mouse focus. It is how it was designed to work, and I fear it's only the M$ junkies who have migrated to Linux that have demanded a broken version of sloppy focus.

I may need to return to PCLinuxOS because this distribution is broken now. nemo is a poor replacement for nautilus, and since focus is extremely important to how I work, and I work with Linux as my primary tool, I can't put up with broken distributions.

I could go back to Fedora, but I don't like having to rebuild/recompile things.

I might just learn everything I can about gentoo, because then I can control every part of the OS.

But I don't have the time to mess with my OS any more. I used to play around and enjoyed getting everything to work.

I'm now in my late 50's and have gone through Windows 3.11, windows for workgroups, and dumped windows as my primary OS at Win98se.

Okay, I'm rambling and it's now obvious nobody is able to help.

I may just move away from Mint for a time. The forum isn't as helpful as other forums. With senior folks like me never seeming to be able to find answers, it's now wonder that most Mint gurus turn to LinuxQuestions or Ubuntu forums. Or even just plain Unix.com, which may still be the best one out there.

Yeah, I'll go check there.

Cinnamon is based on gnome3 and it uses gsettings to manage options. There OUGHT to be a checkbox in the cinnamon windows settings dialog to enable mouse focus and auto-raise, but until there is you can do the following from the command line.
The auto-raise-delay parameter is in milliseconds, you can set it to whatever you like.

Very awesome. I doubt I would have found gsettings, or the syntax, without your help.

Okay, I DID NOT find them after searching for a while.

On older versions, I have drilled down to the %CONF% files in the filesystem, and manually checked settings after using the commands I used to use in Gnome using gconftool-2. Of course, they didn't make any difference, but your submission helped immediately. Real-time fixes are awesome!

Thank you very much. I'm a happy camper once again.

I've done some sleuthing and find that 500 is the default according to /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences.gschema.xml

That file doesn't seem to hold the settings, though it looks like it could, so manaully editing it, then rebooting may solve the issue. Auto raise is off by default in that file. Is that a system-wide setting then? Linux has become, more or less (and I hate to even mention it because I've used Linux as my primary OS for about 15 years now), a single-user OS like MAC and Windows, so having these default settings may become all that's needed with built-in "sudo" for commands modifying the file(s)...

New Laptop, New Version of Linux Mint Cinnamon: v16-64bit

Guess what. Auto-Raise is AGAIN BROKEN!

Are the Cinnamon devs doing this on purpose? Is it upstream Ubuntu has been over-run by annoying former Microsoft programmers who, it seems, universally fail to see the benefit of Auto-Raise with Sloppy Focus?

Nothing that has worked in the past works. All I can get is Focus Follows Mouse. This is very annoying. Very.

Okay, I loaded dconf-editor, since Cinnamon is based on Gnome's DCONF model, and I searched for "mouse" and found, finally, the setting which worked. It's a no-brainer, because the command-line tool, gsettings, should have worked.

The option is:

org > cinnamon > desktop > wm > preferences (the only item under preferences).

So, the option with gsettings is incorrect in my previous solutions, and I can watch the checkbox in dconf-editor check and uncheck if I run it with true or false.
I hope this helps someone else as it has me.

Thanks for the solution, kpearson. I too wondered why this important option in Cinnamon 2.0 was missing. I think it should be added into the Window options section of the settings.

Agreed.

I am amazed at how many solutions I've found where the "asker" wanted to disable focus follows mouse, not get it to work. To me that is defeating one of the most productive and time-saving parts of X.

Let me not click all the time and my finger and me are much happier.

I like the focus following the mouse, but I must admit normally I just click to raise a window. I quite like it though when it auto-raises after a few seconds.

I think it would be great if Mint had lots of options like this. One of the reasons people choose Mint over Ubuntu is to have a more professional and traditional -looking desktop, that is precise and powerful. Customization of things like this is a welcome part of that IMO

I agree completely!

Does anyone know how to submit this request onto the following site? This forum says to put requests on:

https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon

I haven't looked into it much. Perhaps somebody already requested it.

Wow, that site isn't confusing to use at all... No really. I just went and searched, and there are things for focus, but not auto-raise. So, I think the former windows, current Linux Mint noobs are outnumbering real Linux users. We need to get someone's attention some how, but that site is out of my time-frame to work...

I have to say that I found this thread searching for a way to disable raising on click. It really bugs me, I often want to be able to type on a window that is not raised. In Cinnamon 2.0.14, I can't figure out how to have focuse-follows-mouse and Alt+Click to raise.

Anyway, thanks to this thread, I found it at org > cinnamon > desktop > wm > preferences > click-to-raise

Deselecting that lets me (finally) be able to avoid raise on click. Never forget, what you consider "broken", others consider good

That's what's so great about Linux.

I know Win7 has this feature now, but it's flaky and annoying because it's so inconsistent. With some apps, just doing a mouse-over auto-focuses and auto-raises. With other apps, the mouse has to go to the title-bar for it to work. And sometimes, it's not consistent even within the same app. That is very annoying, and is why I'm happy to not have to work on Windows all the time, or most of the time, or even Some of the time. I use my company laptop to play Spotify or Pandora But it too will be Linux Mint pretty soon. I'm waiting until I've been with this company for a few more months to be sure I don't really need it on Windows. At least it's not on that horrific excuse of an OS, Win8 (I know. Someone likes Win8. More power to them, too, probably).

kpearsonxyz wrote: org > cinnamon > desktop > wm > preferences (the only item under preferences).
I hope this helps someone else as it has me.

Thanks, I was wondering how to get sloppy focus back in Mint 16. It seems to be that click-to-focus is the default on modern distros, contrary to over two decades of X tradition. Bleagh.

Anyway, thanks muchly for the help.