Thank you for your response.
Yes, with "disabled" I mean "unchecked".
[hm, the following argumentation has gotten rather long, sorry, but
please bear with me]
No, I do not want the new window to have focus. But it doesn't make sense to
open a new window somewhere in the background, where it is hidden by other
windows, up to the point where you keep waiting for the program to launch,
wondering about whether something is broken, only to realize after some time
that the window was launched correctly - just invisibly behind all others.
This is especially apparent for several system utilities opening subwindows:
you wait forever for something to happen, but the new window has been there all
along - *behind* the main window...
If I request an application to start, I expect to see the window, because I
want to do something with it. Now, you could argue the same way about the focus
thing: "If I request an application to start, I expect it to have focus" -
well, not for everyone. I almost exclusively work with X-terminals, so
generally I launch applications from the CLI with the '&' background option.
Applications take a while to launch, and I don't want this to impede my work,
so I don't want them to have focus, even when they do eventually pop up. The
*user* should decide whether he wants to give focus to something, by moving the
mouse (or in the default setup, by explicitly clicking a window).
In addition, as mentioned, this worked perfectly fine in both Hardy and
Intrepid: new windows popped up somewhere on the desktop, did not steal focus,
but still popped up in front of other windows.
The correct definition and expected behaviour I wish for and worked with for
many years is: "the current focus is wherever my mouse pointer is", because I
put the mouse there and that's where I want to do something. Windows should not
steal focus just because they pop up somewhere, this breaks the consistency
that focus is where the mouse pointer is.
With the current configuration options, this concept is not possible to realize.
I realize that the whole problem is a "don't care" for 98% of all users,
since they use this awful Windows-like default behaviour of "click-to
focus" instead of "focus-follows-mouse", but the new behaviour in Jaunty
makes the configuration setting "Automatically give focus to newly
created windows" useless, because having windows popup in the background
is not desirable.
Proposing a possible solution (besides windows being *always* forced to pop up
in front, which would be fine by me):
The actual option that is missing (and I seem to remember having seen exactly
this option in a pre-9.04, probably GNOME, not sure) is "Open new windows in
front". This would be the most flexible setting satisfying everyone: you can
emulate the behaviour you described (new windows receive focus and pop up in
front), you can configure the setting I describe (no focus, but still pop up in
front), and you could even have the current Jaunty behaviour, if there are
people who desire it (no focus, and pop up in background).
** Changed in: xfwm4 (Ubuntu)
Status: Incomplete => New
--
Xubuntu: newly opened windows are no longer placed on front
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/366683
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