bug#7553: 24.0.50; please disable focus-follows-mouse per default and document mouse movements associated with this variable

[Gregor Zattler]

severity wishlist
stop

Please change the default value of the variable focus-follows-mouse to
nil and mention the fact that setting the variable leads to mouse
movements which are not user controlled in the documentation of this
variable.

The current setting leads to surprising and irritating behaviour because
of erratic (from a users perspective) mouse movements as discussed in
bug reports 7269 (http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=7269) and
1980 (http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=1980).

It is especially annoying when working on a terminal (where one
usually does not use the mouse) and leaving an emacsclient session
suddenly moves mouse and focus to another graphical Emacs frame.

How to reproduce:

Start X with only 
exec xterm
in your ~/.xsession.  

Start X via startx.  This will start X without window manager in order
to reproduce the bug without interference of a window manager.

Move the mouse over the xterm in the upper left hand corner.  Start an
Emacs server with a graphical frame in the bottom right hand corner:

emacs --eval '(server-start)'  -g 40x20-0-0 & 

Edit some file in a terminal session:

emacsclient /tmp/somefile

Leave the editing session via server-edit C-x #.  

Now the mouse jumps to the upper right hand corner of the graphical
Emacs frame.  Focus will follow this mouse movement.  In order to work
in the terminal again one will have to move the mouse back.

This is especially annoying when the terminal window and the graphical
Emacs frame are on different screens. 

Thanks for your attention,
Gregor