RFE: Never, ever steal focus.

[Owen Taylor]

On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 16:00 +0100, nodata wrote:
> I'd like to suggest an enhancement for Fedora 13: nothing should ever 
> steal focus from the window I am typing in. If I am typing in a shell 
> window, or in a word processor, or an e-mail, nothing should ever take 
> keyboard focus away from that window.
> 
> Clearly I'm missing something, otherwise we would have this, hence the 
> posting to the list :)

I'm not sure what you are missing, but I know what I'm missing here - a
description of when exactly focus was stolen from you that was a
problem.

In almost all cases, if you are typing into one application in Fedora,
and a window pops up from another application and steals away your
focus, and your typing goes to the wrong place, that's a bug that should
be filed against one of:

 - The application that popped up a window
 - The application that you are typing into
 - The window manager

With the most likely candidate being the first one. If you run into such
problems and you are using GNOME with Metacity (or gnome-shell and
Mutter), please feel free to file bugs against Metacity and I'll help
you figure out where they should be reassigned. 

There are also a number of GConf options for Metacity that can be set to
modify the exact behavior; these are mostly, however, intended as
workarounds for people using closed source applications that can't be
fixed properly. When all the applications are under our control, it
should "just work".

- Owen