Comment 6 for bug 700764

It's a problem with the window manager. If Scribes tells the
window manager to focus a window, it should do just that.
But alas, some window managers decide to be too smart for
themselves by implementing things like focus prevention.

If Scribes tells the window manager to focus the window but
the window manager decides to do something else, there's not
much Scribes can do.

If the window is a dialog there's no problem. Since you can
set a dialog as a transient to a parent window.

In Scribes case, however, the recent open window is not a
dialog. It's an external program that runs in a separate
process. As far as I know, there's no way to set an external
window as a transient for another window. So the recent open
window is at the mercy of the window manager to focus it
properly.

The gnome-shell folks need to turn off focus prevention. If
they don't well multi-process applications will just be
broken in gnome-shell.