Focus stealing behaviur.

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Sunday January 24 2021 13:48:18 A. F. Cano wrote:

>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.

If you really wanted separate focus on different screens you'd need separate keyboards and mouses as well. I call that different terminals ;)

>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?

It would probably be possible to set a specific window manager hint on windows that are opened by explicit user actions, which window managers could then use to ponder focus stealing prevention. Who knows, maybe such a feature already exists in other window managers.

There are alternative solutions, like giving back focus explicitly to the application (and window) that had it; this could be done by charm for its alerts.

Have you played with focus-follows-mouse; with that you can set things up such that the window that has the mouse cursor usually (or always) has focus.

>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?

Possibly, but the window manager needs additional information to tell the 2 apart, and sometimes you don't want that behaviour. A kwallet password dialog should always open in front, for instance (and those are posted by the kwallet daemon, so not by the application that needs the password).
>
>This is on a totally up-to-date Debian 10/stable.
>
>Thanks for any explanation or hint.
>
>Augustine