Linux KDE: “Focus Strictly Under Mouse” considered harmful

Hey,

I'm posting this because it's been driving me claaazy, and i finally figured it out… Maybe you've had this too.

Houdini 8.0.383, Linux (Gentoo) running KDE 3.3

Problem Summary: you hit tab, get a menu, then one of it's submenu's, but when you move the mouse into the sub-menu it disappears.

Problem Specifics:
Let's say I want to place a sphere sop.

I use different Houdini setups at home & work. At work, when I press “tab + s” I see two remaining sop's in a sub-menu, held to the right of the tab-menu. I move the mouse over to the sub-menu and choose “sphere”. great.

At home, however, when I move the mouse over to the sub-menu it would disappear! The moment the mouse moved off the tab-menu, towards the sub-menu, the sub-menu would go away. Gah!? The only way to keep it there would be to click on the top line of the main tab-menu (which indicates a partially matched sop name), and drag across into the sub-menu. That would keep the sub-menu there, and I could make a choice. Hmm. Annoying. Been there? I started doing this ridiculous mouse-manoeuver at work today..

Solution:
I finally worked out it was the KDE Mouse Focus Setting I had at home. I had selected “Focus Strictly Under Mouse”. Changing this to “Focus Under Mouse” fixes it.

An easy way to reconfigure this is to RMB on the Houdini Window Titlebar (actually, any KDE Window Titlebar) and select “Configure Window Behaviour”. In the pop-up Dialog, Select the Focus Tab, and change the “Policy” pull-down menu to “Focus Under Mouse”, or whatever.

Oh, and by the way, not everything is an “nvidia driver problem” … :-)

cheers,
ben.

Hey, Ben!
I see you use KDE. Do you have a problem that I described here?
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=2600&highlight=kde [sidefx.com]

Huh…. Pretty old stupid problem from old KDE 3.1/H6.0 to KDE3.3/H8.0 :evil:

No, No problem. Note i'm running KDE 3.3 though.

It runs full screen, just fine (at 1920x1200), and resizes as you'd expect.
I note that mplay doesn't understand the maximise-button, but ^F (in mplay, does full-screen) is a preferred work-around anyway, so who cares!

Actually, neither mplay or houdini have the Maximise Button on their Window Titlebar. I just checked again. I have “F4” configured as a KDE Shortcut to Maximise/Restore a window, and neither respond when I hit it. But they both resize just fine.

One last comment: when Houdini first starts it obscures the KDE Panel at the bottom of the Window. I have KDE configured to allow windows to do this. I just resize the bottom frame. It hasn't annoyed me enough to configure it otherwise. :-)

ben.

Hey Ben,

Yeah, I've been having the same issue.

Before I switched to RHEL4.0, I was using RH7.3 with KDE 2.x & the KDE “Focus Strictly Under Mouse” option seems to work fine with Houdini, I think. I'll have to test it again on a RH7.3 box. Maybe the problem is with KDE? Hmmm…

I will post an update.

Cheers!
steven