Understanding GNOME Shell’s focus stealing prevention
Understanding GNOME Shell’s focus stealing prevention
blogs.gnome.org
Understanding GNOME Shell’s focus stealing prevention
9 comments
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This is one of my biggest complaints and all I hear when I read this article is excuses. They want the devs of the apps to implement a protocol that they just aren't implementing. Or the app is old, or it's running in wine, or... Or... Or... Or maybe this approach just isn't working and they've made it everyone else's fault.
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I hate focus stealing so I might set mine to strict, now that I know that's an option.
It's an absolute nightmare to be typing, some dialogue box pops up, and I accidentally accept it by hitting spacebar without even seeing what it was.
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It feels like it wouldn't be that hard to just prevent stealing focus if the user is already typing...
And then just have the new window show up in focus if they haven't been typing for a while, and/or don't have an active text field
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Yeah, that would help. There's also the smaller risk of "I was going to click on something else, and this new window popped in under the mouse"
I think some applications also don't accept input for the first couple seconds to prevent this. I vaguely remember something that had the dialogue boxes count down from 5 before you could click or keyboard-interact them.
Feels like the kind of problem with a lot of edge cases, but even catching 70% of the problems would be a big improvement
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Now tell me why Alt-Tab randomly decides that I'm using Firefox when I'm not.
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I understand why, but I still hate it. Thankfully there's Grand Theft Focus
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I really don't get all this attention to focus prevention. I personally can't remember the last time I had a window popping up without it being something I want and expect. IMHO It looks like a theorethical attack vector (steal focus right when typing a password), but in practice I've never heard of it happening, not even on windows were focus stealing is fully allowed and expected.
If I had any app stealing focus randomly, the app would be nuked out of existance in no time.
I did experience though focus stealing prevention breaking apps (for example the open folder dialog in vscode not appearing in the front). It also breaks some interruptions that I really really want, like the evolution calendar notification window popping up on top of everything telling me I really should be in a meeting right now (and no, a slowly fading notification on the corner of the second screen I'm not looking at right now won't work)
A big thank you to the authot of grand theft focus for bringing a bit of sanity back.
9 comments
I love this