exclude programs from input device grabs

[Peter Hutterer]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 05:23:24PM +0000, Patrick Sebastian Zimmermann wrote:
> I searched around a bit and found that my WM (awesome) already grabs
> the root window and still becomes unresponsive with a menu clicked or a
> game running. Could it be that the necessary parts for this to work
> (is that part of mpx?) are not in xserver 1.3?
> If this is the case, then basicly everything I wanted to achieve has
> already be done.

once a grab has activated, only one client receives events. So if an app grabs
the mouse, neither the WM nor anyone can actually receive events anymore.
This is in fact one of the points of grabs.

be careful about mixing terminology here, "grabbing a key" (which is what you
wanted to do) generally means putting a passive grab on the keyboard for a
specific key. You can have multiple of those, but while any grab is active,
they cannot activate anymore.

so I think what you want is a passive grab to activate while another grab is
active and that simply isn't supported. Except for XEvIE, which I think routed
all events unconditionally through the client.

Cheers,
  Peter