Creating track groups / window focus missing?

When I create a track group, I see that the track name is highlighted / selected.

That makes me think that I can now type in the group name – but when I start typing, things start jumping around on the screen, and I realize that I wasn’t typing in the group name, I was issuing keyboard commands to Ardour. I then click the “Name” field and select it:

…and only now it’s ready to type in the group.

I tried to find a keyboard shortcut (on Linux), to switch focus to the group creation window, but I couldn’t find one. Alt+TAB doesn’t do that, and neither does Alt+`.

Wouldn’t it make sense to switch focus to the new group window when creating a new group?

It could depend on window manager type and/or configuration. Try setting “Preferences → Quirks → All floating windows are dialogs”. After enabling this, the focus is switched correctly on all dialogs (including Track/bus group) on my KDE based system.

That helped, thank you!

I wonder if there’s a way to set this by default? (based on specific circumstances)

Once you set it it will stay set.

What circumstances are you thinking of? The issue here is your window manager and how it gives keyboard focus (or doesn’t) to new windows based on their type.

I was thinking mainly about the window managers, and how they give keyboard focus. Covering the most common cases would go a long way.

We do cover the common cases. We cannot know what window manager you are using, and we thus cannot set it correctly for every possible user.

This also changed in recent version of Ardour.
The new group dialog is now modal, and unconditionally catches all keyboard events.

When editing an existing group however the issue you describe is still there (and WM dependent).

I see that you still use an old version (groups now have alphabetical names by default).

Hm, I’m running:

Ardour 8.6.0
“Kite Stories”
(rev 8.6)
Intel 64-bit

Is there a newer version? The download section of the website shows Ardour-8.6.0-x86_64.run as the latest version.

As far as the window manager is concerned, I thought that there were environment variables that a program can examine to discover the type of window manager. Perhaps this point is now moot because of the change mentioned by Robin.

I don’t know of any way to determine the identity of the window manager, and even if there is a way to do so, we are absolutely not going to start writing per-window manager hacks.

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