On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 06:31:39PM +0100, 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.
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.
Like Ted wrote it appears that a newly opened window steals focus. It is this I want to stop.
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.
It's possible to prevent this by using devilspie (plus gdevilspie if you want a GUI). With this you can specify, for example, that Firefox always opens on desktop three.
It's the way I run my system, news and mail windows are always on desktop 1, Firefox on desktop 3 (and sundry other things are fixed elsewhere). If I open a mail in mutt which has a link then I right click on the link and click "Open Link", this opens the link in Firefox on desktop 3 but has no effect at all on what I'm doing in mutt in the terminal window until *I* decide to switch to desktop 3 and look at the link.
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.
Any more ideas?
nev
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