Note that here I’m talking about windows getting focus when they launch, rather than focus-follows-mouse or window click-through (I’ll leave that one to Gruber).

Recently, I’ve learnt something about how window focus works on OSX, and subsequently been fairly disappointed by how it works in X (and probably Windows, but correct me if I’m wrong).

OSX has this great feature where if you hold down SHIFT at the same time as using your mouse scroll wheel, it’ll scroll horizontally instead of vertically. If you don’t have a laptop, this is an immensely useful trick. Sadly, I couldn’t find any way to get this to happen on linux.

But now, thanks to some direction from stackoverflow, I finally figured out how to do it myself. The world of X11 input hackery is somewhat twisted and full of projects either abandoned or in disrepair, but I finally stumbled across the right set of tools.

If you’d like to get this (rather excellent) feature in linux, you will need the following:

• Install the packages xbindkeys and xautomation: sudo apt-get install xbindkeys xautomation

• Save the following file as ~/.xbindkeysrc.scm :

    ; bind shift + vertical scroll to horizontal scroll events
    (xbindkey '(shift "b:4") "xte 'mouseclick 6'")
    (xbindkey '(shift "b:5") "xte 'mouseclick 7'")
  

• Use your favourite mechanism to ensure that the xbindkeys command is run at the beginning of your xsession (I added it to ubuntu’s “startup items” preference, but you can surely use init.d if you’re comfortable with that).

So I had this great idea yesterday (for coders, at least): remap [shift+space] to [underscore]. Turns out I am far from the first to think of this, which only enforces its awesomeness as an idea.

Mac: Put this in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict:

{
	/* turn shift + space into underscore */
	"$ " = ("insertText:", "_");
}

Linux: for a PC keyboard, try:

xmodmap -e 'keycode 65 = space underscore'

or on a mac keyboard:

xmodmap -e 'keycode 57 = space underscore'

Or if neither of those work, run:

xmodmap -pk | grep space | awk '{print $1}'

and use that number instead of 65 or 57 above.

You can put this keybinding in ~/.xmodmaprc or somesuch if you like it.

snap-open is handy. Unfortunately, it’s terribly crippled if you have a lot of files, since:

• it uses the linux find command, instead of an index-based file list
• it doesn’t run in a separate thread, so it locks up your entire GUI while it goes off to trawl your file heirarchy every time you change a letter in the find box

So I fixed it a bit. It is now threaded, and uses the linux locate command. This is still not ideal, it would be much better to use beagle. But I couldn’t figure out how to do that real quick, so locate it is (for now).

Update: As MadsBuus Points out in the comments, SnapOpen has improved a lot since then. Also, I’ve taken a similar plugin (gedit-openfiles) and turned it into a console-based file finder that allows you to open files with your preferred editor. Since I no longer use gedit, I think having a file finder independent of your editor is a pretty neat feature.