Focus stealing behaviur.

[A. F. Cano]

Hello,

One particular application (Charm time tracker) has an activity time out that
pops up a window.  This window then becomes the active window and steals
focus from any other window on the desktop, which consists of 4 screens, one
of which is the tv on which MythTV (DVR) is running.  This means that the
remote stops working.  Quite annoying.

I found System Settings -> Window Management -> Window Actions and Behavior
-> Focus tab, which provides the "Foxus Stealing Prevention" drop-down menu.
None, Low and Medium don't prevent this behavior.  High does, but it has
an unintended consequence (at least from my point of view): any window opened
by any application in response to a mouse click, now doesn't have focus,
requiring another mouse click to raise it.  Also annoying.

The settings page also has a check box under "Multiscreen behavior" to
have "Separate screen focus" but it doesn't do what it seems this implies.
Even when checked, a popped up window still steals focus, even from another
screen.

What the ideal behavior would be is that an unrelated program could not steal
focus from the curently active window (the DVR in my case) but yet when a
program pops up a new window (by mouse click or keyboard shortcut) the new
window will have focus.

Is this possible? Shouldn't there be a difference between totally unrelated
programs stealing focus and a window that appears in response to a mouse click
in the same program?

This is on a totally up-to-date Debian 10/stable.

Thanks for any explanation or hint.

Augustine