I like to have the focus follow my mouse, but I also like to be able to both minimize and restore windows by clicking the window button in the panel. If "click to focus" is set, then I get that behaviour. If I change to "focus follows mouse", then the behaviour of the window buttons seems to be a bit unpredictable. After some trial and error on my part, I've worked out the behaviour of focus-follows-mouse on Xfce. --> When focus-follows-mouse is enabled, clicking the window button for each window will bring that window forward, but not give it focus. --> Clicking the window button of a focused window will minimize it, even if it's not at the front.brings it to the front, if it is minimized, else it will minimize the window. --> If the window is already brought to the front and not focused, then clicking the window button will do nothing This seems like a bug to me, although some might argue it's working as designed. Either way, the root of the (apparent) unpredictability was that when focus-follows-mouse is enabled, window buttons on the panel do not affect the *focus* of the target window. It seems to me that this should be the expected behaviour.
I created a bugzilla account just because this is very annoying. I think the "window buttons" item in xfce4 panel works by focus, while we need it to work by raised window. In windows OS, focus always goes to the raised window. But on Linux we can have focus follows mouse and raise (activate, bring to front) on click. (An accessibility option exists under settings - window manager tweaks - accessibility to bring to front (raise is the correct term) with a click of any mouse button, but that makes the window raise even if you simply scroll, so I have that disabled because I also need to scroll a window under the mouse without raising it) Back to the way windows works, I use the same method as OP to minimize/raise windows; I intensively use the "window buttons" area to minimize or raise a window. But with the current working model of xfce4 panel, it seems impossible do have this when "focus follows mouse" is enabled. I wish we had an option in the properties for "window buttons" item so we can choose raise+minimize policy between focus and raise. Is this pretty doable in time to catch the next release? My sense tells me it's trivial change. Thanks!
also the proposed option would fix issue #12705
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