Comment 10 for bug 537943

You are right regarding the WM. The compiz settings manager, section "general options", tab "Focus & Raise Behaviour" has a setting "Focus Stealing Prevention" which....well prevents windows from "stealing focus".

By default it says "any", so it prevents all windows from stealing focus. I now extended it like that:

(any) & !(class=Cairo-dock)

And voila! Now the terminal applet correctly gains focus when called. I cannot yet say if this has some other side effects (I would have liked to more specificly exclude the terminal applet rather than the whole cairo-dock application, but didn't know how) but right now I consider this problem solved. Sorry for the confusion!

Great, so now finally I have a powerful replacement for tilda dropdown console, which became impractical with my current dual screen setup.