i3: Focusing with mouse stops working. Focus sometimes gets stuck on i3 and i cannot click inside any window.

Output of i3 --moreversion 2>&- || i3 --version:

Binary i3 version: 4.13 (2016-11-08) © 2009 Michael Stapelberg and contributors Running i3 version: 4.13 (2016-11-08) (pid 14558) abort…) Loaded i3 config: //home/exi/.config/i3/config (Last modified: So 24 Jul 2016 05:58:08 PDT, 26025342 seconds ago)

The i3 binary you just called: /nix/store/fyp2zyyc66v76qcwqxq1siqzpy80kdc0-i3-4.13/bin/i3 The i3 binary you are running: /nix/store/fyp2zyyc66v76qcwqxq1siqzpy80kdc0-i3-4.13/bin/i3

What I did:

Open Firefox with some tabs
Open Chrome with some tabs
Click around in Chrome a bit.

What I saw:

I now cannot focus any i3 container with my mouse anymore. Also i cannot click anything in any window anymore. Restarting i3 via key bindings resolves the problem until I click around in Chrome/Firefox some more. Sometimes the i3 focus will get stuck on i3 itself and scolling the mouse will switch through my workspaces although I clicked on a container and expected it to have focus.

What I expected instead: My windows should have focus and should be selectable/clickable via mouse.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 7 years ago
Comments: 51 (5 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

I had the same problem, i have an MMO mad catz mouse, my problem was solved when i put these line in my xorg.conf: Section "InputClass" Identifier "Mouse Remap" MatchProduct "Mad Catz Mad Catz M.M.O.7 Mouse|M.M.O.7" MatchIsPointer "true" MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" Option "Buttons" "24" Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 4 5 0 0 8 9 10 11 12 0 0 0 16 17 7 6 0 0 0 0 0" Option "AutoReleaseButtons" "20 21 22 23 24" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7" EndSection Hope it helps

ensismoebius on Apr 15, 2019

In my case, it was fixed with kernel update to Linux arch 4.17.4-1.

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17827?cversion=0&cnum_hist=24

yutkat on Jul 8, 2018

this is also happening to me, is very annoying when im at work and trying to move fast. sometimes(only sometimes) if I ctrl+alt+f2 and back to main it will work.

r3k2 on Jun 12, 2018

I experience the exact same problems also with i3 v4.13 (2016-11-08). I could reproduce it with windows of any program, by clicking inside the window of the currently active and focused window. After this focus would not follow the cursor anymore. Two ways are known to me that fix the symptom: Reloading the configuration using the restart i3-command, or changing to a different workspace and back again, which is usually much quicker and doesn’t mess up the window size etc.

But, until now, with very little testing, I failed to reproduce this issue with i3 v4.14 (2017-09-24). I recommend updating and closing this issue.

Columbus240 on Nov 14, 2017

Thanks for the observation. Possibly related are #2401 and #2409. We certainly know that focus handling with windows that reject focus is a little broken in i3, there’s an issue for that which I can’t find at the moment.

Airblader on May 31, 2017

Here is the log: http://logs.i3wm.org/logs/5683739602452480.bz2

yaqwsx on May 31, 2017