drop-down menus losing focus in xmonad (and possibly similar window managers)

[Tyrir 3]

When clicking drop-downs, e.g. "High", "Medium", "Low" options in the graphics settings, the drop-downs would immediately close after it  opened preventing me from making a selection. This made it a pain to adjust settings because I would have to use up/down on the keyboard instead of the mouse. Another related issue was that the mouse position was offset resulting in mouse clicks registering several pixel away from my pointer.

Turns out this is a java bug with non-reparenting window managers e.g. xmonad, awesome, dwm. I was able to fix the issue by setting the environment variable _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING to any value. This instructs java to treat your window manager as a non-reparenting window manager.
 

export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1

My application versions, fyi

• Oracle JDK: 1.8.0.60-r2
• xmonad: 0.11-r1
• xorg-x11: 7.4-r2

Additional info:
https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Frequently_asked_questions#Problems_with_Java_applications.2C_Applet_java_console
http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Problems_with_Java