Comment 36 for bug 272083

My version of zenity is also 2.30.0, i mistyped it before, cause i was testing it on 9.10 too.

Lately i realised that this behavior is a matter of the window manager. Running zenity from a terminal, its window doesn't go to the top in Gnome when i have other window active. It does, when running it by clicking on an icon. So the wm probably prevents the popups getting focus that are run from an inactive terminal.

This is not an issue with Xfce's wm or other wm though that i tested on the same system. So it's probably the way metacity behaves by default.

I tried to set the focus from smart to strict as the only option here with gconf-editor in /apps/metacity/general/focus_new_windows, but it doesn't help either.

Seeing that the file /usr/share/zenity/zenity.ui has all its focus settings set to True by default (what the patch did provided in upper comments), i might say that it's not a zenity problem anymore, and it depends on the focus policy of the wm.