Re: Focus stealing

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 15:31 +0000, Michael T wrote:
> 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".

What you are describing is not normal behavior. Probably the right place
to report bugs of this nature is in Ubuntu Launchpad, since it's a
question of interaction between components and might depend on the exact
version of the code or on non-upstream changes in Ubuntu.

Information you'd want to provide:

 - In what exact circumstances is focus stolen (is the Empathy
   conversation window already open - is it on the same desktop or a
   different desktop? and so forth)

 - Window manager (Metacity or Compiz)
   
 - Can you reproduce it in a newly created account? (maybe it's
   triggered by some preference you've changed.)  

> > 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.

It's possible that the focus management mechanisms could have been
designed along those lines. At this point, though, it's pretty much
academic, since a lot of effort has been put into our current system,
and in general it seems to work OK. (Though not for you, for some
reason.)

- Owen