I have just updated a laptop from (X)ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 and this resulted in an update of fvwm from 2.6.8 to 2.7.0
I have noticed a change of behaviour (with the same .fvwrc). I am expecting focus following mouse movement. On 2.6.8 when I move the mouse into a partially obscured window, it gets focus and is raised to the top.
On 2.7.0 it gets focus but it not raised until I click on the title bar or borders.
Not sure which option did what I liked in 2.6.8, I suspect one of
ColormapFocus FollowsFocus
Style * SloppyFocus
Has it changed in 2.7.0 ?
Is there a new option to reinstate the old behaviour ?
Fvwm focus behavior would never raise after focus, this was often done with one of Fvwm’s modules, either FvwmAuto or FvwmEvent. I cannot think of any change between 2.6.8 and 2.7.0 that would have caused that change, unless you were causing the raise to happen in some nonstandard way.
If you want windows to automatically Raise after they gain focus look at the two modules I mentioned.
I have FvwmAuto 500 in all my config since ages.
On the 20.04 desktop with 2.6.8 and SloppyFocus as soon as I move the mouse the window raises.
On the 24.04 laptop AFTER the upgrade to 2.7.0 the same does not occur.
So far I replaced SloppyFocus with MouseFocusClickRaises, but this is not exactlu what I was used to.
It was FvwmAuto that was doing the raising, not fvwm, so you’ll have to double check that the module is running and debug any issues as to why it isn’t running anymore (or not working). I cannot think of any change between 2.6.8 → 2.7.0 that would have effected this. But 2.x is no longer supported, fvwm3 is the current supported version.
Pity that 2.7 is what is distributed by default. Maybe I’ll experiment with fvwm3 on the laptop before I upgrade the desktop (which I use 95% of the time).
Anyhow you are rigjt, FvwmAuto is NOT running on the 24.04 laptop (while it is on the 20.04 desktop). I checked that its executable exists (upgrades have the trend to split things into new packages and not load them).
How can I debug why it is not started ? In .xsession-errors there is no message.
Debian (and thus distros that share packages) has packages for both fvwm (which is version 2) and fvwm3, that you can install side by side (though they share the same config file you may need to be careful there).
Anyways, 2.7.0 should be mostly the same 2.6.8. I don’t know the best way to debug why the module isn’t running correctly. I would probably need to see more of the configuration, but are you launching FvwmAuto from your StartFunction or just as a line in your configuration file?
I use StartFunction.
My config is available in a link in a previous post. But I won’t spemd much time in solving this issue. I moved to MouseFollowFocus and that should suffice on the seldom-usd laptop.
I have seen fvwm3 is in the distro, and spent some time yesterday reading the online manpages, and taking notes. I would probably use the laptop as a guinea pig for fvwm3.
I think that using “config” as name for fvwm3 and “.fvwm2rc” for fvwm2 would avoid conflicts because of naming priorities (am I correct ?)
Anyhow I consider this particular thread closed.
Will post separately later (not soon) if i get problems with fvwm3 (may be not !!)
fvwm2 by default also looks for a config file called config. If you want to run both, you can make your config file a wrapper that checks if the environment variable FVWM_IS_FVWM3 is defined, and either load a config for fvwm2 or fvwm3 based on that condition.
To really close this thread, I am experimenting with fvwm3 (I will report in a separate thread), and I can confirm that THERE FvwmAuto does work.
So I will soon(er or later :-) drop 2.7.0 and earlier