On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 08:16:57PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
nev young wrote:
I am using a gnome desktop.
[...]
Like Ted wrote it appears that a newly opened window steals focus. It is this I want to stop.
[...]
Any more ideas?
The venerable WindowMaker has a preference "Automatically focus new windows" right on the first pane of its preferences dialogue. I just tested it with a Ted-style sleep 20 ; xterm command and it worked.
So I think this is a window manager configuration problem. Probably there's some mistake in the Gnome interface guide which requires new windows to get focus. It wouldn't be Gnome's first mistake IMO.
'Modern' window managers don't provide anywhere near as much control of application windows as older ones did. It's one of the things I miss about fvwm (to which I return at regular intervals), one could specify exactly where you wanted each application to run, its window decorations and everything like that.
If you try and persuade modern designers/programmers to provide the same facilities they say "It's not the window managers job" to do this and suggest nasty add-ons like devilspie to do it instead. (I've had exactly this discussion/argument with the xfce team)