Re: Focus stealing

[Michael T <raselmsh hotmail com>]

Owen Taylor <otaylor <at> redhat.com> writes:
> So, it's not really useful to ask about focus stealing prevention
> without providing a detailed description of what applications you are
> using and the behavior you are seeing; focus stealing is not expected
> behavior on the Linux desktop.
Empathy launched from the Ubuntu indicator applet is one of the applications
that often steals my focus.  That is one I notice a lot, as I am often busy
typing in passwords when it pops up.  This morning, Evolution also popped up
while I was typing a password into Firefox.  I don't know the details of the
current protocol, but I suspect that indicator applet may be "doing the wrong
thing".

> GNOME will generally focus such windows, because not focusing them would
> result in legacy application not getting focused when launched.
I suppose that the difference in what I am suggesting is that I am not really
talking about focus stealing, but more about focus donation.  So that it is the
responsibility of the application doing the launching, not the application being
launched, to say whether it is willing to donate its focus (if it has the focus
to donate of course).  Presumably there are less legacy applications to fix
which can launch others than those which can be launched.  And if a running
application does not indicate a preference (i.e. a legacy application) and has
the focus, a newly created window could be given the benefit of the doubt (and
the focus), possibly subject to heuristics.

Regards,

Michael