don't steal focus, ever

[avdd]

Binary package hint: metacity

Windows should never, ever, steal focus.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Unfortunately we can't fix it, because your description didn't include enough information. You may find it helpful to read "How to report bugs effectively" http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html. We'd be grateful if you would then provide a more complete description of the problem.
 We have instructions on debugging some types of problems. http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProcedures
At a minimum, we need:
1. the specific steps or actions you took that caused you to encounter the problem,
2. the behavior you expected, and
3. the behavior you actually encountered (in as much detail as possible).
Thanks!

[avdd (avdd)]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Close gedit if open
2. Type (don't paste) the following into a terminal:

gedit &
ls
ls
ls
ls
ls
ls
ls
 (etc)

Expected result:

terminal should keep keyboard focus

Actual result:

gedit window receives focus and keyboard input

Replace gedit with any gui app and behaviour remains.

[Marnanel Thurman (marnanel)]

What would you like to see happen when you type this into a terminal?

zenity --error

According to your suggestion, the dialogue will appear but remain hidden behind the terminal.

[avdd (avdd)]

Quoth Thomas Thurman (2009-03-05 01:47):
> What would you like to see happen when you type this into a terminal?
>
> zenity --error
>
> According to your suggestion, the dialogue will appear but remain hidden
> behind the terminal.
>

1. That is exactly what actually happens,

2. That is exactly what I would want to happen, because

3. mixing modes in this way (console to GUI) is very broken.

If I'm busy typing away and some other process decides to show an
error in this way, I would likely miss it because I've been typing
and happened to press 'enter' at an inopportune moment.

Never, ever steal my focus. It's just rude. Knock before
entering, say "excuse me", etc.

[dahlberg (dahlberg-cs)]

I wonder, how often this happened already to me:

You have an terminal open and try to SSH to some other machine. So you're asked for your passphrase, you type it in and suddenly some window pops up for some reason (may it update-manager, nautilus, gedit or whatever) and there you have get your passphrase shown in clear text. Everybody near you has the chance to see it and you have -- once again -- to change your passphrases on every single account where you used this one.

And -CMIIW- the same thing may not only when using the terminal with an ssh/scp/etc. session, but with other (X-) windows too.