[iPAQ] Xscribble and focus issues (was Another success story (and a few questions))

Here I go, answering my own questions again:

Carl Worth writes:
> Hello iPAQ hackers,
>
> Now that I am up and running, I have a few questions:
>
> 2) Less importantly, what's the exact focus policy for xscribble
> passing its input to other windows. If I have only an xterm and
> xscribble up I am able to reliably get input to the xterm. But if I
> have several windows up at once, I often have difficulty getting
> the input to go to the window I want.

OK, I understand this a lot more clearly now:

        xscribble simply passes recognized keystrokes to whatever
        window has the input focus. This is natural and is of course
        The Right Thing To Do.

So, for ease of use, what I usually do is the following:

        1) Click on the titlebar of the window of interest to give it
           the focus.

        2) Use the window-manager raise command to bring xscribble to
           the front, (but without giving it focus)

        3) Scribble away.

The default twm setup with v0.13 makes step #2 awkward because raise
is buried under three menus Apps->System->Window Ops->Raise. But it's
trivial to bring raise to a closer menu.

This works out great and I am starting to feel comfortable entering
shell commands with xscribble. But, what I would *really* like is a
way to scribble directly into the xterm or any other window. I have
two ideas so far:

        1) If xscribble could be made transparent then it could simply
           run full-screen. It would probably be convenient to have
           one of the physical iPAQ buttons bound to raise/lower
           xscribble so that it would be very easy to switch between
           the scribbling and passing mouse events to the other
           application.

        2) Incorporate the character recognition into the window
           manager somehow. Honestly, I think this is a bad idea. It
           would require a lot more work than #1 and it would only
           benefit one particular window manager and input
           mechanism. Solution #1 above is much more general. (In
           fact, I'm probably just wasting time mentioning
           solution #2).

Didn't I see somewhere a web-page concerning new extensions to X to
support transparency?

-Carl
Received on Thu Aug 31 04:20:16 2000