Focus stealing is evil.

Posted by lunixbochs on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by lunixbochs
Published on 2010-05-12T13:37:38Z Indexed on 2010/05/12 13:44 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 191

Filed under:

focus-stealing

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Windows

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user-interface

A quick Google search for solutions to Focus Stealing in Windows reveals two main result categories:

People suggesting incomplete solutions involving the ForegroundLockTimeout registry entry (or TweakUI, which I believe simply changes the aforementioned registry entry), which isn't very effective.
Incessant hordes of Windows users complaining about it.

It's particularly annoying in two common scenarios:

Something triggers a program to popup a dialog window in the background while a fullscreen app is focused, causing the fullscreen app to minimize.
A window steals focus while you are typing, stealing all of your keystrokes. If you happen to press Space, Enter, or trigger a keyboard shortcut (like Y for Yes), it can cause completely undesirable outcomes.

What creative solutions can be applied to fix this problem for either or both of these scenarios?

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