MATE/Cinnamon: focus-follows-mouse turns itself off after a while

[Peter Berry]

Mint 17, Mate edition.

I prefer focus-follows-mouse, which you can turn on in Preferences -> Windows -> Behaviour ("Select windows when the mouse moves over them"). Unfortunately this setting automatically turns off after a while and MATE reverts to the default click-to-focus. I'm unable to turn it back on.

The attached screenshot shows the window preferences window after this happens. The "Raise selected windows after an interval" option should be greyed out since it only makes sense if focus-follows-mouse is on. If I check "Select windows" and close the window, the behaviour is still click-to-focus and opening window preferences once again shows both boxes unchecked and not greyed out.

[Vlad Orlov (monsta)]

I was able to partially reproduce it.

Indeed, the checkbox in the mate-window-properties window turns off by itself after I close and reopen the application. And the "Raise selected windows after an interval" option is unchecked, not greyed out.

But the focus setting itself stays turned on. It doesn't revert to click-to-focus.

My MATE is fully updated, check whether yours is the same.

Also a question: do you have compositing enabled?

[Rich Hart (sirwizkid)]

I have the same problem. I do have composting enabled

[Peter Berry (pwberry)]

All packages are up to date and compositing is off.

[Vlad Orlov (monsta)]

Does the focus setting itself stay turned on in your system, or does it turn off automatically?
I mean the mouse behavior you experience, not the checkbox in the properties.

[Peter Berry (pwberry)]

Behaviour is click-to-focus. If it stayed as focus-follows-mouse I probably wouldn't have found the strange behaviour of the checkboxes.

[Peter Berry (pwberry)]

I should probably point out that "a while" is vague because I haven't timed it, but I think it's probably a few hours. Unless you have the patience to work with it on for that long, it probably won't reproduce.

[Rich Hart (sirwizkid)]

For me, I have composting on and fully patched systems.
I can go in and click the preferences checkbox, close the window, no focus follows mouse.
Then if I go back in to the preferences the focus follows mouse checkbox is not checked.
This seems to have worked fine for a week or two, and then nada.
I have this on 3 boxes, and they all have the same behavior.

[Rich Hart (sirwizkid)]

One other question. I was looking in gconf, and mate's equivelent (can't think of the app name right off hand).
I couldn't find where this is set in the gconf stuff for mate. If someone knows right off hand, can you tell me where
in the config tree this setting is located?

[Vlad Orlov (monsta)]

Well, I've left a virtual machine running with this setting on for 9 hours, and it didn't switch off.
Apparently, you need to do "something" during these hours to make the setting turn off. But I cannot know what you need to do.
Can you try to find it out?

[machrider (machrider)]

I'm not sure about the behavior change you saw, but I did see the checkbox failing to initialize properly when opening mate-window-properties. A fix was just merged upstream in the 1.8 and master (1.9, 1.10) branches: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-control-center/pull/124

[Farhadino (farhadino)]

Same here, Mint 17.2.

However, the prefe rences stay unchanged. Setting stays checked, but focus follows mouse doesn't work: Preferences -> Windows -> Behaviour ("Select windows when the mouse moves over them")

[Peter Berry (pwberry)]

I'm now unable to even turn focus-follows-mouse on:

1. Open window preferences
2. Go to "behaviour" tab, check "Select windows when the mouse moves over them"
3. Click Close button
4. Open window preferences again

Result: Focus-follows-mouse is still off and the "Select windows when the mouse moves over them" checkbox is not checked.

[Chance Harris (chance-harris)]

Ditto.

>more /etc/linuxmint/info

RELEASE=17
CODENAME=qiana
EDITION="MATE 64-bit"
DESCRIPTION="Linux Mint 17 Qiana"
DESKTOP=MATE
TOOLKIT=GTK
NEW_FEATURES_URL=http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_qiana_mate_whatsnew.php
RELEASE_NOTES_URL=http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_qiana_mate.php
USER_GUIDE_URL=http://www.linuxmint.com/documentation.php
GRUB_TITLE=Linux Mint 17 MATE 64-bit

compositing off.

I did a reboot, and the behavior returned to focus follows mouse (which is what I want), but in Control center->Windows, It still claims to be doing focus on click, and won't save the focus follow mouse display state if I click on it.

May be a complete Red Herring , butI did this yesterday :

sudo apt-get install mono-complete

and noticed the behavior for the first time today.

[Mike Kobler (mkobler)]

I just ran into a similar problem. Installed keepass2, which depended on mono and now sloppy focus does not work, even though it is configured.

$ cat /etc/linuxmint/info
RELEASE=17.3
CODENAME=rosa
EDITION="MATE 64-bit"
DESCRIPTION="Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa"
DESKTOP=MATE
TOOLKIT=GTK

$ gsettings get org.mate.Marco.general focus-mode
'sloppy'

[Peter Berry (pwberry)]

I also use KeePass2, so it could well be an issue with Mono.

[Peter Berry (pwberry)]

Changed title because even though I changed to Cinnamon to work around this, it still happens.

[Johnathon (kirrus)]

Confirmed by multiple reporters. I'm seeing this with Ubuntu mate. The option stays ticked for me, but doesn't function.

[Eric Ding (ericding-alum)]

I see this on Linux Mint 18 with Cinnamon, the option stays ticked, mono is installed but not necessarily running when focus-follows-mouse stops working. Has this basic behavior bug (or bugs) really stayed around for over two years without being addressed? Sad. :-(

[William Skellenger (wskellenger)]

I also have mono and keepass2 installed. After uninstalling keepass2 (sudo apt remove keepass2 -- mono was still installed), mouse focus started working immediately. I've reinstalled keepass2 and mouse focus still works. Doesn't make any sense.

Does it have to do with the post-installation triggers (i.e. what happens below)? I have no idea.

Removing keepass2 (2.32+dfsg-1) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.5-1) ...
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.15-0ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for shared-mime-info (1.5-2ubuntu0.1) ...
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.13.3-6ubuntu3.1) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22-1ubuntu5) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.59ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for bamfdaemon (0.5.3~bzr0+16.04.20160824-0ubuntu1) ...
Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf-2.index...

[William Skellenger (wskellenger)]

My last comment was on a work computer w/ Ubuntu 16 and Cinnamon. On my home computer with Mint 18 + Cinnamon, I started having problems after mono-complete was installed.

I did:

apt remove mono-complete keepass2
apt autoremove

reboot

mouse focus started working again.

apt install mono-complete keepass2

reboot

mouse focus still working

[Dave (david-stringer)]

I have Mint 18, before that I used Mint 17 and before that Ubuntu 12.
On all of these the focus follows mouse exhibits this or similar behaviour.
After an apparently arbitrary amount of time focus follows mouse stops working and refuses to work again until re-login.
I have not been able to link it with any specific application, but for example this last time Chromium crashed and broke focus follows mouse.

[zen (zen-0)]

Same problem here.

Cinnamon 3.6.7 (Gtk 3.18.9-1ubuntu3.3) dm: lightdm Distro: Linux Mint 18.3
Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
Keepass2 and mono installed (libmono-system-xml-linq4.0-cil libmono-system-data-datasetextensions4.0-cil libmono-system-runtime-serialization4.0-cil mono-mcs)

focus-follows-mouse turns off after a while. very annoying. Try to post more information here later. (If I don't change the OS before).

If I remember right it turned once on again, without reboot (but not 100% sure).

Is there any workaround other than reboot?

[Dave (david-stringer)]

I can confirm this still happens.
After an arbitrary amount of time focus follows mouse just stops and fiddling with settings makes no difference. Sometimes a few weeks will pass before it happens. I've not been able to link it to a specific app, but in case it matters I do use KeePass2, which I see mentioned in other posts. Keepass2 is not always running when the bug triggers.
Restarting the desktop via login works, but this is rather annoying.

# cat /etc/linuxmint/info
RELEASE=18
CODENAME=sarah
EDITION="Cinnamon 64-bit"
DESCRIPTION="Linux Mint 18 Sarah"
DESKTOP=Gnome
TOOLKIT=GTK
NEW_FEATURES_URL=http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_sarah_cinnamon_whatsnew.php
RELEASE_NOTES_URL=http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_sarah_cinnamon.php
USER_GUIDE_URL=help:linuxmint
GRUB_TITLE=Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon 64-bit

[Eric Ding (ericding-alum)]

@zen-0 wrote: Is there any workaround other than reboot?

If you're running Cinnamon, right click on a panel, select Troubleshooting > Restart Cinnamon.