d2r: give me back my focus!

give me back my focus!

<rant>
I am sick and tired of Windows stealing my focus away from the current window to show me a helpful message about some dramatic action that an app would like to take, exactly while I'm doing something else where I type the letter that ends up triggering something I don't want to do. I have no issue with apps "suggesting" actions (e.g., "would you like to autoarchive your old items now?") but it's high time Windows stopped sucking focus away from the current window. This is particularly bad if you touch-type (as I do).

Most X-Windows window manager don't do this (I can't remember if the OS X does it... it very well may in some cases) but Windows is definitely the worst at it. The only message acceptable when stealing focus is an information window for something really important, without buttons for confirmation (otherwise you may click "Ok" and never see it again).

Can you tell that I just triggered something bad in the middle of typing furiously?
</rant>
I feel much better now. Thank you. :)

Categories: soft.dev
Posted by diego on October 15 2005 at 11:49 AM | TrackBack (0)

Comments (please see the comments & trackback policy).

Amen. Drives me up the wall. OS X does it with apps on occasion: the worst offender being MS Word (ha!) but it's not nearly as bad.

In Windoze, I find that Tweak UI's focus setting helps a little, but sooner or later this gets mysteriously "reset" / "switched-off" and I have to set it all over again. Of course, this is only for focus with applications and dialogs: nothing, NOTHING can get me away from those damn Windoze alerts courtesy of the systray.

Posted by: Ben Poole at October 15, 2005 1:24 PM

+1000, This "feature" is so annoying, random window steals focus while you are typing and before you know it, you've done something you don't want to do and it can sometimes take hours to figure out how to undo it.

Great rant!!!!!

Posted by: Kirk at October 16, 2005 12:14 AM

What they should do instead is have a feature in the windows GUI framework that slaps a developer with a piece of fish if they put a focus stealing dialog into the code that can be called when the window doesn't have focus.

Posted by: Helen at October 17, 2005 10:45 AM