On 01-Sep-10 11:19:34, nev young wrote:
Hi all, One of the major annoyances I had with MS Windoze was the habit of programs to force themselves into the foreground.
I would have some long running task running in the background, or will have started a "slow to fire up" program, meanwhile I continue working on "the task in hand" with the program in the foreground. When I looked at the screen I see the background task has popped up and forced itself into the foreground and the last half dozen sentences I had typed had been lost to it.
I have noticed that this is also becoming more common with linux (unbutu 10.04) and was wondering if this behaviour is a part of the programs themselves or if there is a system wide setting that will stop it.
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.
Anybody out there have more in depth knowledge of this sort of thing? Nev
This is prossibly more a matter of your desktop/window manager settings than it is due to programs "jumping the queue".
Generally speaking, if you have started up a long-running program in one window on the desktop, and then raise/open another window in order to do something else (e.g. edit a file), then the latter one should "stay on top" unless you take some action which raises the other one (e.e. clicking on its window).
Are you using Gnome? KDE? In Gnome, the sequence Desktop --> Preferences --> Windows will open a "Window Preferences" window which shows the option:
[ ] Select windows when the mouse moves over them
If you leave this unchecked, then things should behave as I describe above. If you check it, then of course if the mouse wanders over to another window while you are typing then that window will pop up to the top.
Even if you leave it unchecked, it is still possible (e.g. on some laptops with sensitive touch-pads) that the movements of your hands while typing can be picked up, causing the mouse to move around unnoticed by you, and at some stage to be picked up and interpreted as a mouse-click (e.g. as a tap on the touch-pad), which would then cause the other window to be raised as though you had done it on purpose, even though you hadn't intended to.
Similarly, if you are using a mouse with a cable and the cable is picking up EM radiation (e.g. mains hum or from power supply brick), then that can cause spurious mouse events.
Another thing in your description refers to a "slow to fire up" program. It could be that such a program itself opens a window once it finally manages to get its shoelaces tied, which then gets priority. For example, one program (a shell script) which I use is invoked from an Xterm window, and that program then opens three new windows. Each of these new windows, as it comes up, is "on top", so it ends up with the third window to open being the one which has the focus. The original Xterm from which the script was invoked is now "at the back of the queue".
I don't know how to over-ride that. I just live with it (the next step being to re-arrange the open windows to where I want to find them when I'm working, so whichever one I'm moving around is going to be the one which gets the focus while I'm doing that; then I click on the one I want to work in).
But, if you find yourself in that sort of situation because of the actions of a "slow to fire up" program, I think I'd just wait until it has got its act together; or else be prepared for it to happen at some stage and watch what you're doing when it happens!
Just some thoughts -- anything more specific would depend on knowing more detail about what's going on when this sort of thing happens.
Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 01-Sep-10 Time: 13:27:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------