Theft of Focus

Oh Windows. I have grown up with you, loved you since a young age when I didn’t know there were any alternatives, any other ways to use a computer. While things have changed over the years, I still really enjoy using Windows. However, I have one major gripe with it (and don’t think Windows is the only guilty operating system here, there are many more I can assure you). Here’s my gripe: pop-up windows, or other applications, stealing focus of the keyboard when I’m in the middle of typing, or for any other reason. Say, for example, I am in the middle of writing an email to a colleague and all of the sudden, PuTTY decides “hey guess what, your connection is no longer active” and throws up an error message telling you this, thus stealing the focus of your email client and spewing all kinds of crap all over everything.

This is by far the most aggravating thing I come across in regards to using a computer on a day-to-day basis. Why, in heaven’s name, does some window or application think it is more important than whatever window I am currently TYPING IN! There is absolutely no reason for this to happen. The operating system (or to be more specific, the desktop environment’s window manager) should explicitly stop this from ever occurring. I don’t mind pop-up windows or notifications, just please make sure they pop up behind whatever window I am currently typing in. I’m sure my colleagues will appreciate getting messages that are complete and not full of garbage because half my message got cut off. Hell, it could be much worse than a malformed email, I could have been “rm -rf”-ing something in “/foo/bar” and accidentally ran “rm -rf /” because my backup client decided to tell me it backed up some files (which b.t.w. is great, but I don’t have to be informed every day. Just do your job and keep quite about it Mr. Backup Client).

Time to get working on some patches to fix this problem I suppose. There’s no way I’m the only one with this problem, I honestly can’t believe it is still a problem considering I’ve been fighting it (and losing I might add) since my youth.