Window Manager FReq: focus_follows_eyes

[marcmagus]

I have a feature request for any window manager designers out there: focus_follows_eyes

I currently use Ion as my window manager on my home computer. It's great. You hardly ever need to use the mouse, and it seems to generally just Do The Right Thing. Except that sometimes it's so good at doing what I want it to that I forget which window has keyboard focus and start typing into the wrong one, because I've moved my attention from Firefox over to an IM conversation I'm having but haven't actually told it to move focus.

Clearly, what I need is for focus to move by default to whatever window I'm paying attention to. An interesting paradigm for that would be a monitor-mounted camera tracking my eye movements and keeping focus in whatever window I'm looking at. (Better, use the sloppy focus model so if I'm copying text from a printout or having a conversation with somebody focus will stay where I last looked.) You'd need to bind Scroll Lock or something to lock focus on a window for when you're manually copying text from one window to another or something like that. But wouldn't it be cool?

Comments

[kiddens.livejournal.com]

If you ever want to return to school for a graduate degree, you've got yourself a research project.

[marcmagus]

Heh. I may, but I don't know that that's what I'd want to do.

Actually, taking the idea one step further, it might be interesting to completely replace the mouse with the eye-tracker. If the technology were good enough, one could probably even do away with the visible mouse-pointer, on the theory that you know where you're looking. (Better to make it optional, I suspect)

Of course, the combination of focus_follows_eyes and raise_on_focus would be even *more* annoying than with focus_follows_mouse (which is so annoying I don't know how anybody can stand it).

[illogicalvulcan.livejournal.com]

Why does this seem like I would *still* accidentally send code to my friends who IM me?

[marcmagus]

Because you're a geek?

I think it might help me stop sending IMs to my code/Firefox, though.