On 01 Sep 18:31, nev young wrote:
On 01/09/10 14:01, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 01/09/10 12:19, nev young wrote:
That is, I want to be able to specify that the foreground task I am using does not lose focus unless I tell it to.
Not a solution, but a possible work-around: does right-clicking the title bar of program you want to keep focus as selecting "always on top" help?
It may not, given that having focus and being on top are not the same things. But might be worth trying.
NB: I also would like to have a solution to this, although I haven't put any effort into finding a solution in the past.
Thanks to all for the replies so far. It is good to know that I'm not alone in disliking this behaviour.
I am using a gnome desktop.
I feel sorry for you (but only because I really can't stand the look and feel of a standard gnome desktop - I don't quite work the same way as everyone else).
To give one (of many) examples of how this gets in my way consider this. I'm writing to emails in a maximised window using Thunderbird. I need some info that I have in a spread sheet so I fire up OO. Knowing it will take some 15-20 seconds to start I switch back to TB and continue to compose the email. OO grabs focus when it is ready and I lose what I'm typing (I'm not a touch typist) and / or I overwrite data in the spread sheet now open.
That's not OOs fault infairness to it, that be the window managler again...
Also, not being a touch typist, surely you check the characters that are appearing on the screen occasionally - or are you permanently looking at the keyboard?
(I'm not exactly a touch typist, but my eyes spend a hell of a lot more time on the screen, or sometimes when needing to readjust them, out the window, than on the keyboard...)
Like Ted wrote it appears that a newly opened window steals focus. It is this I want to stop.
Configure the window mangler to not give focus to new windows then - though, you might find that this becomes annoying behaviour later on...
Opening on a different desktop doesn't work as OO will open on the desktop in use not the one it was started in. I guess other programs will do the same.
That's actually a window manager thing, not OO or any other app... awesome (to use an example I'm familiar with) will happily let you start things on completely different tags (it's semi-equiv but more powerful version of desktops). I would also bet that if one got just the right joo-joo in the ~/.Xresources file you could define which desktop to put the app in using the correct hint, but I've not tested that :)
Selecting "always on top" would be a pain as I would have to minimise the window to get something else in front. Also it doesn't seam to last across invocations.
That's because it's just a hint set on the running apps window, the app doesn't even have to know about it at all, it's a window manager thing... Apps that do have an always on top button (rather than the window managers one), are generally just setting the hint and letting the windowmanager do the work anyways (as they should). Apps shouldn't need to worry about such things, it's what window managers are for.
Cheers, Brett