<![CDATA[Cinnamon (again) and hacky non-bugfixes]]>After getting frustrated with Ubuntu’s Unity interface to the point of wanting to bludgeon myself to death with a bag of squirrels, I tried out Cinnamon by manually installing the latest version. It’s actually pretty nice, except for one major annoyance: every time I get a skype message, it un-minimises the relevant chat window and brings it over the top of my current foreground window/process. This is really annoying. There is a bug entry in Cinnamon’s bug database, but it closes with this frankly disturbing comment by someone called Clement Lefebvre (clefebvre):

I don’t like the idea of this being configurable.. mainly because this isn’t a question of preference but a question of fixing a bug. The focus should always be taken when the user launches a new app and never be taken on his behalf when he doesn’t trigger the creation of new content.

For Skype, I fixed the bug with this https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/commit/c5bbcad1cc4cc8183f2556deef867d0fae5f0109

Well, right, it’s a bug and should be fixed properly, but, check out the fix:

if (!window || window.has_focus() || window.is_skip_taskbar() || window.get_wm_class() == “Skype”)

What the … it actually checks for Skype and handles it specially. That’s got to be wrong. Clement then goes on to say:

For other apps which face a similar issue, I’d like people to insert the following code at line 27 in /usr/share/cinnamon/js/ui/windowAttentionHandler.js:

global.log_error(“Focus stolen by : ” + window.get_wm_class());

Then restart cinnamon, and when the focus is stolen from you, click on the ^ applet, troubleshoot, looking glass, click on the error tab, and you should see the wm class name of the app which stole your focus. Give me that wm class name, and we’ll add it to Cinnamon.

Oh for fuck’s sake… this is not how you do these things. Fix the bug in Cinnamon, make it respond to notifications properly for all apps; don’t just implement a workaround on an app-by-app basis. Am I missing something here? Surely other window managers aren’t implementing this workaround (because they don’t need to, because they handle the notification correctly in the first place)? This doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the quality of Cinnamon.

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