Gnome and Redhat: Where’s my focus follows mouse setting?
Nov 3, 2010
Just playing around with RHEL6. There used to be a setting under System/Preferences/Windows which allowed the keyboard focus behavior to be changed from the idiotic default of “click to focus” to the more sensible “focus follows mouse.” (Note: window raising is a separate thing, and focus follows mouse does not imply that the window with focus gets raised.) This ability to easily changes this setting has been removed. There’s still a way to change it, but it’s been made very obscure.
Gnome programmers, if you think it’s a good idea to have “click to focus” behavior instead of “focus follows mouse,”and far worse, to inexcusably get rid of the easy way to set the behavior to the only sane, sensible way, which is “focus follows mouse”, it means one thing: You’re a fucking moron.
What the fuck is wrong with you morons?
Put it back. Now.
If you’re too stupid to figure out why, here’s a fucking clue.
The fact that millions of Windows users are accustomed to stupidity is no reason to institutionalize the very same stupidity in gnome.
Scary Reasoner 
The follonging seems to work:
gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode -t string sloppy
or mouse instead of sloppy…
@pstray: THANK YOU. jezum crow, it took me 20 minutes of googling to find you.
@pstray Thank you so much for this one.
@pstray Thank you for this help!!!
@pstray Thanks. I agree with the original comment, that it’s ridiculous to remove the gui functionality to change this option.
You’ll be heart-broken to know that Ubuntu & Mint have followed in this stupidity also.
Matt: but it’s really far worse than that, with all the major subdistros (i.e.: not Debian, RHEL, etc) having gone to Gnome 3. If you want Gnome 2 likebehaviour (and a system preferences tool that has a simple gui setting for focus follows pointer, as well) you probably want to switch to XFCE anyway. It’s not quite as slick as the last Gnome 2 was, unfortunately, but it’s a major step up from the “my workstation is now a tablet” abomination that is Gnome 3. (I exaggerate for effect, but sadly not much.
)
And, pstray++ I had found that command before, but couldn’t remember it. But hey, this is now the top google hit for “gnome focus follows pointer”, so, there’s your15 minutes. 😉
Bravo! Thank you. I too am sick of the moronic script kiddies who seem to have bastardized all the distros into idiotic M$ Winblow$ ugliness. Linux is for USERS not LUSERS!