MacOS – Applications assigned to All Desktops loses focus when moving through desktops

The answer is simple (and very Apple-like!).

Simply close all extra desktops until you only have one desktop. (To do this, go to Mission Control, hold down alt and click the crosses which appear on unwanted desktops).

Then change the desktop background for the one remaining desktop.

Now any new desktops you create will inherit the background of that first desktop.

In my case it was the Maven Failsafe Plugin that caused the annoying window focus stealing of ForkedBooter, and setting the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS variable in .bashrc didn't help.

This fix applies to both Failsafe and Surefire (although in my case, Surefire wasn't stealing focus).

In your pom.xml, add a <argLine>-Djava.awt.headless=true</argLine> line inside the <configuration> for the failsafe (and/or) surefire plugin.

It will look like this:

<!-- this is inside your <project><build><plugins> block -->
<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${maven.surefire.plugin.version}</version>
    <configuration>
      <includes>
        <include>**/unit/**/*Test*.java</include>
      </includes>
      <!-- prevent the annoying ForkedBooter process from stealing window 
        focus on Mac OS -->
      <argLine>-Djava.awt.headless=true</argLine>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>
  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${maven.failsafe.plugin.version}</version>
    <configuration>
      <!-- prevent the annoying ForkedBooter process from stealing window 
        focus on Mac OS -->
      <argLine>-Djava.awt.headless=true</argLine>
      <includes>
        <include>**/integration/**/*Test*</include>
      </includes>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
      <execution>
        <goals>
          <goal>integration-test</goal>
          <goal>verify</goal>
        </goals>
      </execution>
    </executions>
  </plugin>