Focus Stealing, how to stop it?

[Tai...@gmx.com]

How do I stop focus stealing? I have accidentally entered ssh passwords
in to other windows as they keep stealing focus for irrelevant things.

[Jean-Philippe Ouellet]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 10:17 PM, Tai...@gmx.com <Tai...@gmx.com> wrote:
> How do I stop focus stealing? I have accidentally entered ssh passwords in
> to other windows as they keep stealing focus for irrelevant things.

AFAIK there is no consensus on how to best solve this problem.

It has come up before in various forms:
https://github.com/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=org%3AQubesOS+focus+stealing

Suggestions & proof-of-concept implementations would be most appreciated!

[Andrew David Wong]

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Personally, I just set all the normal (i.e., GUI settings menu
accessible) settings in Xfce4 to their maximally anti-focus-stealing
values. Some users may find this too inconvenient, but I've gotten
used to it. I never have problems with windows stealing focus.

- --
Andrew David Wong (Axon)
Community Manager, Qubes OS
https://www.qubes-os.org
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[Jean-Philippe Ouellet]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 10:00 PM, Andrew David Wong <a...@qubes-os.org> wrote:
> On 2017-04-20 21:56, Jean-Philippe Ouellet wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 10:17 PM, Tai...@gmx.com <Tai...@gmx.com>
>> wrote:
>>> How do I stop focus stealing? I have accidentally entered ssh
>>> passwords in to other windows as they keep stealing focus for
>>> irrelevant things.
>>
>> AFAIK there is no consensus on how to best solve this problem.
>>
>> It has come up before in various forms:
>> https://github.com/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=org%3AQubesOS+focus+stealing
>>
>> Suggestions & proof-of-concept implementations would be most
>> appreciated!
>>
>
> Personally, I just set all the normal (i.e., GUI settings menu
> accessible) settings in Xfce4 to their maximally anti-focus-stealing
> values. Some users may find this too inconvenient, but I've gotten
> used to it. I never have problems with windows stealing focus.

What does this mean? What specifically do you change?

Just disable "Automatically give focus to newly created windows"?
Something else?

[Andrew David Wong]

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Just go into the Xfce settings menu in dom0 and systematically look at
every option. (Pretty sure they're all in "Window Manager" and "Window
Manager Tweaks.") If it sounds like it would affect focus stealing, try
setting it to whichever value sounds like the value you'd want, then
test the result. I don't remember all the values I changed, since it was
a long time ago, but there aren't that many. Should take less than 10
minutes.

- --
Andrew David Wong (Axon)
Community Manager, Qubes OS
https://www.qubes-os.org
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[David Hobach]

Yes that can help.

It heavily depends on your window manager though.

In particular the topic of "focus stealing" is a heavily subjective one:
You actually want to change focus at some point, don't you? So what's a
correct and what's an incorrect focus change?
VMs in Qubes cannot steal the focus themselves from another VM (except
for maybe requesting that from your Window Manager in dom0 - I guess
it's at least implemented that way), but your Window Manager may be
configured in a way that does not reflect your idea of "correct focus
change"...

For example for me I defined the only correct focus changes to be:
- Mouse move & click
- workspace changes
- pre-defined key combinations
(and drop everything else)

Awesome should allow to enforce these rules (the default Qubes config
allows more btw), I don't know about xfce.

[Chris Laprise]

KDE has a settings tab under 'Window behavior' devoted to activation and
focus, along with a specific focus-stealing prevention setting.

--

Chris Laprise, tas...@openmailbox.org
https://twitter.com/ttaskett
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