Re: Can Emacs help here (running on Linux, display on Windows)?

[Skip Montanaro]

> When gui emacs receives the mouse click it moves the point to that
> location from wherever it was before.  The point is moved.  You might
> not want to move the point because it was where it needed to be for
> the next edit.  But clicking on the window to raise it will also move
> the point.
...
> Skip, I think your only option is to click on the title, frame, or
> border.  That should raise the window without sending an event to
> emacs.  Or alternatively switching to using a emacs inside of a
> terminal window.  Then clicking on the terminal will raise the
> terminal without sending a mouse event to emacs.

Thanks. I was hoping there was some magic little ELisp function I
could write which was activated when Emacs lost focus. It would gobble
up mouse events until the click came for the focus, eat it, then
return, leaving the normal event processing to take over.

The only reason it occurred to me that something like this might be
possible is that it appears Excel does exactly this. If you have a
cell highlighted, when focus disappears, the highlighting disappears
as well (which I find a bit annoying), then returns to that same cell
when you click the worksheet to give it focus. The highlighting
doesn't move to whatever cell the pointer happened to be over. Of the
few other Windows apps I've used, I d on't recall them having this
(nice) behavior.

Not a huge deal. I'll try and get into the habit of clicking the title
bar. I notice that as I've aged (I'm 63 now, started with Gosling
Emacs on VMS at 28), my accuracy with the mouse has degraded a bit.
Certainly some of it is related to the age effect, though some of it
might be that the setups of my various computing environments are
suboptimal.

Skip Montanaro