From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 20 2005 - 15:43:27 CDT

Hi,
  This is primarily a function of your window manager. On Unix
machines you'd use the "move mouse pointer to focus" mode and
you'd leave the "autoraise" feature disabled to prevent you from
having this problem. If you're using MS Windows, it's hard to
prevent this behavior as the window with mouse focus normally
gets raised, and MS Windows requires "click to focus", giving
the type of behavior you're describing.

If you're using a laptop to give demonstrations, then a common
technique used successfully by many people is to display only
the OpenGL window on the external graphics port, and display
all of the VMD menus on your laptop's built-in LCD screen.

On desktop machines, it's often convenient to outfit the machine with
two monitors. As you've discoverd, it's hard to interact with a bunch
of menus without distracting your audience from the important part of
your presentation if they are shown on the same display as the graphics
window. I'd recommend using a dual-screen solution of some kind, as
no amount of window manager tricks will give you as nice of a result.
Most laptops can now run in a dual screen mode where you can display
different things on the built-in LCD and the external projector output,
that's what I'd recommend doing.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 10:17:43AM -0600, Palmer, Teresa wrote:
> I've written a menu to manipulate the molecule during demonstrations.
> However, the OpenGL screen takes precedence i.e. I click on the screen
> and the menu disappears. I want to use the full screen mode for
> demonstrations so I can't locate the menu to one side. How can I make
> the menu take top level precedence?

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078