From: Tamara Temple <tamouse.lists@...>
Date: 2013-07-11T09:35:43+09:00
Subject: Re: RMagick's #display (focus issues) - off-topic?


On Jul 10, 2013, at 7:27 AM, Hal Fulton <rubyhacker@gmail.com> wrote:

> I was playing with a little software idea last night and ran into difficulty.
> 
> Actually, I could start an email with that sentence almost every day.  ;)
> '

I firmly believe one should strive daily for this sort of perfection.

> I wanted a little image-processing tool and felt that Photoshop was
> massive overkill (also, I don't have it anymore, and it's expensive).
> 
> So I thought: It might be fun to write a little semi-interactive program
> with an old-fashioned interface.
> 
> This is Mac OS X, fwiw.
> 
> The basic logic flow was:
> 
>    Read an image file
>    Loop:
>       Read a command via gets
>       Parse and execute the command
>       Display the resulting image
> 
> Which works "mostly ok" -- but when I do img.display and it
> opens a new window... the new window (naturally?) has the
> focus -- I would say "steals" the focus from iTerm.
> 
> Thinking about this, I suppose it relates more to the window
> manager (and maybe ImageMagick and the OS) than to Ruby...
> 

This is indeed a property of OS/X (or any other similar display manager, such as Windows, X, etc)

> Having said that, I wonder if there is a solution to this, other than
> constantly re-clicking in my original terminal window?

I haven't written any native applications in ruby, but I imagine that after you call img.display from your program, you can steal back the focus in your REPL just before you read a command, but again, I'm not sure how you'd do this specifically. You'd probably need to send some message to raise the iTerm window. I know you could do something in AppleScript to do this, but again, not sure what, specifically.

> 
> Thanks,
> Hal
>