On Sun, 09 May 2010 12:58:38 -0700, Lasse Kärkkäinen <[email protected]>
wrote:
I'm sure everyone here is already familiar with this problem, as it has
been around for a decade at least. I am talking about not being to
switch to another window from a full screen game (even though the issue
itself has nothing to do with full screen windows).
I also thank you for bringing it up.
The usual response to this problem is that it is a bug in the game and
that it should be fixed there.
And that response is broken for security reasons: a malicious application
might grab the whole keyboard and mouse and there would be no way of
switching to a terminal emulator (not a VT) to kill the app.
If you are using GNOME, another example would be to open the "Applications"
menu. Any popup menu presented by X requires keyboard / mouse grabbing.
Take a look at this discussion:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=344059
On the other hand, always keeping Alt+Tab to the WM might disturb remote
desktop usage and other things.
So what? Not even a Remote Desktop should ever prevent the user from
switching through his local applications.
I would bet for a way to map the virtual Alt+Tab to Alt+CapsLock.
One option to consider is adopting the Super key as a general WM
accelerator key as an alternative to Alt. Since it is generally not
used by any application software, keeping it to the WM would work
rather well. One could still use Alt instead to control a virtual
machine.
Oh, please don't. I use the Super key by means of a third party app,
and I use it a lot, particularly for global key bindings and
scripting. That would completely break my work flow.
An idea I've been thinking for quite a time is that Ctrl should be
for the application, Alt (Meta) for the WM and Super for the user.
I haven't though about combinations.
Another thing to consider is that most WM shortcuts should indeed be
disabled for games. For example, Alt+drag is commonly used in RTS games
for giving orders but currently that doesn't work without grabbing
because the WM thinks that one is trying to move the window.
If you are grabbing the whole keyboard for the game, why not just use
a different modifier key, instead of Alt? Say use "Z" as a normally-open
button to "giving orders" mode. Some games use scan codes so they can
detect "physically down" and "up" as opposed to "logically pressed" and
"release + autorepeat".
That's where I think some games are broken too.
Kiosk applications would also be affected, as they may currently think
that they can securely grab all input (except Ctrl+Alt+BS, SysRq and VT
switching which need to be disabled elsewhere), so care must be taken
with any change to the grabbing behavior.
A kiosk application should require a kiosk-compatible WM or be the WM
itself. Expecting to have an application to take control of a desktop in
order to make it work as a kiosk seems flawed to me.
So, can this problem finally be fixed, so that maybe 2011 would be the
year of the Linux Desktop :-)
:-P
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