Focus stealing behaviur.

[A. F. Cano]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 09:14:25PM +0100, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> On Sunday January 24 2021 13:48:18 A. F. Cano wrote:
> 
> >The settings page also has a check box under "Multiscreen behavior" to
> ...
> If you really wanted separate focus on different screens you'd need
> separate keyboards and mouses as well. I call that different terminals ;)

Ah...  Ok.

> >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.

Mmm...  Charm has limited options, but one is "Enable idle detection",
which I unchecked.  No more pop-ups that steal focus.

> 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.

That is another option, given that mythtv blanks the mouse pointer after
about 5 seconds when it's on it, but getting rid of the original problem (the
charm pop-up window) seems more elegant.

> >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).

Ah yes.  I have encoutered that issue.  It was a long time ago so I
don't remember all the details, but a window requesting a password
popped up, grabbed focus and wouldn't let go.  There was no option to
make it go away without entering the proper password, which I didn't
remember, and clicking on any other window wouldn't transfer focus, so
the system was unusable.  I couldn't even go to a konsole to shut down.
Not sure how I got out of that.  Maybe I remembered the password
eventually, and after that the system remembered.  It was after some
upgrade, possibly, and that behavior might have been corrected soon
after.

> ...

In any case, thank you very much for taking the time to respond.

Augustine