RE: https://scholar.social/@researchfairy/117532213787969321
"Nothing is ever, ever allowed to grab, alter or surrender focus until five seconds after I've stopped typing, ever" is the number one nonexistent, OS level feature I want from modern computing.
Oct 30, 2026, 10:37 PMand gimme at least 500ms after stuff randomly quits moving around before interpreting my clicks; modern sites load so slowly and inconsistently move around so much that it's impossible to be certain.
one of the most egregious is "site finished loading, but some slow-ass piece of crap async JS content just resized and now I clicked a link that takes an additional 30 seconds to back out of.
@mhoye I'd say that new windows should NEVER steal the focus. Done.
@mhoye linux
@mhoye And no click should take effect within 1 second of any movement of the window's contents.
@mhoye
And yet even if I'm not typing, between the moment that I do decide to press a key, and the time that the keypress is recognized, something will pop up, consume the keystroke, and do something undesired. Anything that grabs the focus should not get any events delivered that occured less than 1 second before its window/dialog/whatever is fully rendered and visible to the user.
@mhoye
In general, I think it might be better just to disallow focus stealing entirely, and require positive action from the user to grant focus to anything.
If the current window which has focus closes, then _nothing_ should have focus.
@mhoye
I know that KDE has this configurable, but either you can set it globally high and password managers auto-type stops working, or you have to set it individually per window or program.
@mhoye that irritates me to no end.. I try to write with Emacs through Debian with Gnome during strart up and later -starting apps steal focus. I want to get morning thoughts and end up yellong taboo words at a machine. Not helpful.for a productive day... or I'll still be writing but want to get Firefox ready to preview an org-mode's html file output and Firefox blocks the view.. it seems like such an awful thing that would not happen by default.. I think Gimp might not take over focus of I'm working on something else while it starts up...
@mhoye SAAAAAME
@mhoye this + paste without formatting being default
@mhoye @researchfairy GNOME actually prohibits background focus stealing!
(which lots of people endlessly complain about but well)
@mhoye
Unfortunately "focus follows mouse" does not protect against it. Checked in X11 and Wayland: a new window always gets focus.
Oct 31, 2026, 12:48 AM@mhoye @GroupNebula563 on my job I use Confluence, the Jira wiki
and Confluence continues to show the caret when it loses focus
every day I start to type something looking at the cursor on the fucking Confluence text box and then I realize I’m typing on another window
it’s infuriating
@mhoye @researchfairy mine to add: if I have moused over an active button/control, you cannot replace or move that target until the cursor has moved off of it