Implement a way to minimize full screen windows like games

[Jens Askengren]

Binary package hint: xorg

There is currently no way to minimize or switch away focus from a full screen window like a game.
The standard shortcuts like Alt+Tab used by the window manager are ineffective because the X input is grabbed by the application.

Control+Alt+Backspace seems to be caught by the X-server though, regardless of any input grab in effect.
What if the window manager could tell the X-server about additional key combinations that should ignored the X input grab?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Hi Jens,

This sounds like an interesting idea for feature development, but is not really a bug.

Instead, I would encourage you to draft a Blueprint spec on this, with a focus on exactly which keyboard shortcuts X should retain. You should also speak about this with the Xorg developers, to ensure the concept is consistent with what they plan to do going forward.

[David Nolden (david-nolden-ubuntu)]

I think this is a very important issue. It should be possible to configure the x-server to ignore specific key-combinatios on input-grab, and then ubuntu would need to set some sensible defaults:

- Ignore all multimedia-keys, so you can use them in games
- Ignore ALT+TAB key combination, so you can switch away.

However there's a problem with this: What about screen-locking, isn't that achieved by grabbing the keyboard? ALT+Tabbing away from a screen-lock would not be very secure. ;)

[LimCore (limcore)]

This is an important idea... it's really annoying how in Ubuntu it's hard to do simple thing lab tab-away from a fullscreen game.

Would be really nice to have it :)

[Dara Adib (daradib)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 63245, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.