Focus stealing

Posted Aug 18, 2005 20:46 UTC (Thu) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link]

It'd be awesome if there was a way to determine where, how, and when an application was launched without something like needing to be launched with startup-notification. But there isn't (okay, 'when' is sort of available if the WM is running on the same machine as the app and uses system calls to determine when the OS started it, but even this time isn't what you really want--you want to know when the user clicked the mouse or pressed enter in order to cause the app to launch which occurred sometime before that; further for apps like firefox/mozilla/nautilus/epiphany/gnome-terminal/gedit/konqueror etc. that forward new window requests to other instances, only the old instance that forwards the request has the appropriate information and if it doesn't get forwarded then you're stuck and have to take wild guesses). Having an app try to determine if it was launched from a terminal somewhere just isn't possible. Anyway, it's just another part of why apps really need to be launched with startup-notification for this freedesktop.org focus-stealing-prevention stuff to work.