Xfce Forum

Ahau

Member

Registered: 2011-12-22

Posts: 27

focus behavior with exo-open + focus-stealing prevention

Hi all,

I'm not sure whether or not this is a bug or if it is expected behavior; if it is a bug, I'm not sure if it lies with exo or xfwm4, so I guess I'm looking for guidance on where to post a report.

What I've noticed is that when I enable 'focus-stealing prevention' under window manager tweaks, most applications continue to open in front of existing windows, with focus.  However, any app that is opened via 'exo-open' will be opened underneath existing windows, without focus.  My guess is that xfwm4 assumes these applications are some kind of popup that ought to be suppressed.  Any suggestions?

I need to have focus stealing prevention enabled because I wrote a gtkdialog script to display the current volume level and mapped it to my laptop volume keys (thus allowing me to drop volumed and gstreamer with essentially the same functionality) and it steals focus from fullscreen apps, e.g. flashplayer and causes them to minimize unless I have focus stealing prevention enabled.  At this point I'll either need to find a different volume display solution or rewrite the menu and panel launchers to open applications directly rather than using exo-open.

Thanks for any help or guidance on this!

Nick

Dev

From: ~

Registered: 2005-02-17

Posts: 1,144

Website

Re: focus behavior with exo-open + focus-stealing prevention

Why use exo-open? Anyway, the problem is that exo-open does not pass the startup-notification timestamp to the child environment, therefore the window does not reply with a valid timestamp to xfwm4 and so it is not focused/kept in the back. You can also play with the gtkdialog types (popup, not a normal window) (or with a simple script/code to use notify-send).

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Ahau

Member

Registered: 2011-12-22

Posts: 27

Re: focus behavior with exo-open + focus-stealing prevention

Ahh, thanks for explaining, Nick!

I'm not manually invoking exo-open, it is used by the panel launchers and some default menu items.  It's no problem for me to customize it out, but I thought I'd make mention of the issue so that if it was a bug, it could get fixed.

I tried doing what I wanted with notify-send first, but wasn't able to get it working right (I wanted a progress bar that moved up and down while the user presses the volume buttons, and changes icons to show mute status).  I wrote it in xdialog as well but then turned it into a gtkdialog script to make it look a little better and get rid of window decorations.  I thought I had tried making it work as a popup and failed...but it's very likely I did something wrong, this is my first gtkdialog attempt