Window raise on frame only

When interacting with a window interface I prefer point-to-focus rather then click-to-focus. This can easily be achieved by enabling “Select Windows when the mouse moves over them” from “Window Preferences” (from Gnome Preferences).

But I also prefer my windows to stay put and not atomically raise to the top when I click in them, for example when using middle-click to paste into the obscured window…

To stop that annoying behavior run ‘gconf-editor’ and enable the Sun Extension ‘window_raise_on_frame_only‘, /apps/metacity/general/sun_extensions/window_raise_on_frame_only (use ctrl-F and search for it). The associated note for which states “If enabled, in sloppy focus mode [point-to-focus], the window will be raised to top of stack when clicked on window frame only. Windows will not raise when clicked inside them.” Sloppy in deed, how dare you 😉

Previously I have unset /apps/metacity/general/raise_on_click which also worked for me. Though it does contain the following description underneath it:

“Setting this option to false can lead to buggy behavior, so users are strongly discouraged from changing it from the default of true. Many actions (e.g. clicking in the client area, moving or resizing the window) normally raise the window as a side-effect. Set this option to false to decouple raising from other user actions. Even when this option is false, windows can still be raised by an alt-left-click anywhere on the window, a normal click on the window decorations, or by special messages from pagers, such as activation requests from tasklist applets. This option is currently disabled in click-to-focus mode. Note that the list of ways to raise windows when raise_on_click is false does not include programmatic requests from applications to raise windows; such requests will be ignored regardless of the reason for the request. If you are an application developer and have a user complaining that your application does not work with this setting disabled, tell them it is _their_ fault for breaking their window manager and that they need to change this option back to true or live with the bug they requested. See also http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445447#c6.”

I do wonder if the above warning does also apply to window_raise_on_frame_only?