We've only seen this problem on SGIs with pointer focus (where the
window gets the keyboard focus when the mouse pointer is moved into
it). If you have the window manager set to explicit focus (click to
type), things are OK as far as we know. If not, please send a report
to support@metacard.com with the details of your configuration.
As for olwm, it is pretty broken in both OpenWindows 2 and 3 (see the
BUGS.txt file for many examples). It's completely unusable with
pointer focus (unless you specify the -p command line option), but
occasionally focus problems occur with explicit focus too. There is
no way to work around these bugs without breaking MetaCard on systems
running other window managers. Since olwm is officially obsolete now
that Sun is shipping Motif, we recommend that people using olwm switch
to mwm at their earliest convenience.
Scott
PS: though I realize that this is a religious issue, we'd also
appreciate it if people using pointer focus could switch back to
explicit focus. Explicit focus works fine for the millions of people
using MS-Windows, OS/2 and Macintosh. It's also the default setting
on NeXTstep, and all systems (with the possible exception of SGI) that
ship with mwm and olwm. The only reason it's even available is
because the old SunView and Apollo Domain systems used to work that
way and backward compatibility was required to make the transition to
X easier. But the transition was pretty much done years ago (though I
occasionally hear reports that there are still people out there
running SunView ;-). It's time to move on.
There are several practical reasons why pointer focus is a bad design,
especially for use with MetaCard. First, there is the conflict one
has when switching back and forth between the Mac or MS-Windows and X.
Second, MetaCard is an active focus application. It only sets the
focus to a window when it needs to. For example, with explicit focus,
clicking on icons in the tool chooser or pulling down menus does *not*
cause those stacks to get the keyboard focus. This means that you can
use the cut and paste menu options without worrying about losing the
text selection. With pointer focus, the window manager *forces* the
windows to take the focus even if they don't want it. If you move the
mouse through a window with field in it, it will take the selection
from whatever field you were working in (this limitation is partially
due to HyperCard: in Motif you can have one field with a cursor while
another has the selection, whereas the HyperCard design requires that
there is only one "selection", which includes the field with the
cursor even if there is no text selected). It also makes doing things
like automatically selecting text when you move into a field
problematic, since the stacks are constantly selecting and unselecting
fields as you move the mouse around.
Finally, many of the current MetaCard dialogs make use of the
defaultStack for determining the stack to use for a particular
operation, and the defaultStack is determined by keyboard focus. For
example, if you're using explicit focus, when you cut some text from
one stack, click on another, and then press paste, it will paste into
the focused stack. With pointer focus, it is often difficult to
determine where the paste will occur. We frequently get reports of
"bugs" in MetaCard where it is pasting into the wrong stack. These
invariably boil down to the user using pointer focus and having to
move the mouse through multiple stacks to get to the menu bar.
Though these recommendations to use mwm and not to use pointer focus
are in the MetaCard installation instructions, there are enough people
out there who haven't followed our advice that I figured that
providing reasons for the recommendations might convince a few
skeptics to switch.
-- *********************************************************************** * Scott Raney 303-447-3936 Remember: the better you look, * * raney@metacard.com the more you'll see -- Lidia * ***********************************************************************