PiP protocol addition...!?

Posted Oct 23, 2025 18:49 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: PiP protocol addition...!? by kolAflash
Parent article: KDE Plasma 6.5 released

> But then it turns out, that you can't even force a window on top of the others without a specific experimental Wayland addition.

As an end user, that's an absolute nightmare. I regularly find my work on Windows messed up by windows (some of which only ever seem to appear as a transient icon in the status bar) stealing focus.

Rule 0 of a decent GUI - don't give the user a nasty surprise! Applications forcing themselves on top of each other are prime contenders for nasty surprises. And what do you do if some idiot programmer forces their error window to the top - and in the process stops you regaining control of the computer to fix the problem?

Cheers,
Wol

PiP protocol addition...!?

Posted Oct 24, 2025 1:54 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

There are times I *want* forced-on-top or forced-focus windows: password prompts. Windows gets this right where privilege escalation prompts and the like are modal to the entire desktop session. Yes, they are quite disruptive when you're not expecting them, but my Windows usage is so limited that I think all of my cases these days are in response to explicit actions.

Contrast this with macOS where password prompts are nigh useless if some window-popping CI is in progress because new windows are "shiny" and get focus, context be damned. Good luck navigating the damned global menu or, once you do get some progress, elevating privileges to kill that rogue process if your admin password dialog can't accept a keystroke in edgewise (and you better hope that the window-popper isn't keylogging you too). In fact, it is so egregious that on machines where we missed disabling the screen lock, if CI (that you could not see…though who knows with Liquid Glass these days) was running in the background, the *lock screen* password entry would also lose focus to those windows in the background.

So yes, focus-forcing is nasty and I detest it happening (e.g., Firefox was able to force-focus itself in XMonad), but with Wayland, the compositor is in full control of such requests and can grant access to such abilities when it *does* make sense.

PiP protocol addition...!?

Posted Oct 24, 2025 8:19 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Password prompts are a complex example. Yes, I want them to forcefully keep the focus, but no, I don't want them to steal focus either because I might be typing something into another window and hit the wrong key at just the wrong time when it pops up and waste a password attempt at best or have some auth system cache wrong credentials or lock me out immediately at worst.

Both of those could be solved by just not allowing focus stealing at all and only allowing the user to manually switch focus to a new window.