Natty: Unable to focus some windows with the mouse

[Dan Smith]

Binary package hint: unity

Occasionally, clicking in an application window or on its titlebar (unmaximized) will fail to give it focus. Clicks on the application are registered (such as clicking on a button) but the keyboard focus stays with the previous window. This seems to happen with both sloppy focus and click-to-focus. When keyboard focus fails, the titlebar matches (i.e. it looks like the window is not selected and the title is dimmed).

It happens very often with the firefox window, and occasionally with others. The only way to get keyboard focus to the affected window is to select it with alt+tab. Once you do this, the title bar properly shows the window as being selected for focus).

This happens on my Thinkpad W510 with nvidia (binary) graphics and on my Thinkpad X201 with intel graphics.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: unity 3.8.6-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
CompizPlugins: [core,bailer,detection,composite,opengl,decor,mousepoll,vpswitch,regex,animation,snap,expo,move,compiztoolbox,place,grid,imgpng,gnomecompat,wall,ezoom,workarounds,staticswitcher,resize,fade,unitymtgrabhandles,scale,session,unityshell]
Date: Mon Apr 25 10:14:27 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/zsh
SourcePackage: unity
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-04-11 (14 days ago)

[Marco Biscaro (marcobiscaro2112)]

Maybe a duplicate of bug #755697 (problem with focus stealing prevention).

[Dan Smith (dansmith)]

Hmm, related maybe, but it still seems to be different symptoms.

Another thing I've noticed is that when this situation happens -- when I can't move keyboard focus to the window -- I also can't raise it by clicking in the application window itself. I can click the titlebar and it will raise, but not if I click in the window itself.

[Pekka Panula (ppanula)]

I have focus problems here too, Thinkpad W510 also, Nvidia driver. Classic desktop.
Sometimes (very often) my mouse clicks does not register and mouse scrolling does not work and i need to click several times and do some voodoo dance that it allows my mouse clicks/scrolling to work.

This after 10.10 -> 11.04 upgrade, in 10.10 i did not havent any these sort of problems.

[Steven (steven3000)]

I can reproduce this all the times by doing the following:

Set a corner of the screen to be a "show desktop" hot corner in CCSM.

1) Focus a firefox windows.
2) Hide windows using the hot corner.
3) Focus another window
4) Unhide windows using the hot corner

This is very annoying and disrupts the show desktop purpose when using it to hide firefox.
To regain focus a click on the firefox icon in unity is needed.

 Also, all seems to work fine for the first time only after starting firefox.

[Mohsin Falak (fi8er1)]

Often happens very often with Chrome and the best to get the application on focus is by clicking on that specific application icon on Unity Launcher.

[Eric Zimmerman (eric-zimtek)]

I can also replicate this bug with workspace switching to a kate editor, and being forced to alt-tab to gain keyboard focus. No other action seems to return keyboard focus to the application.

Kate seems to be the only application that displays this problem for me.

[Zentai Andras (andras-zentai)]

I also have problems mainly with KDE applications under Unity. I'm using Krusader and Kile.

[Ville Ranki (ville-ranki)]

"Me too".

This has already caused passwords entered into Firefox to go to terminal with IRC client running. Very annoying.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

thanks for the bug report. Is that still an issue in Ubuntu 12.04?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Unity because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for unity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]