MacOS – When Terminal forks process, current app loses focus

fullscreenitermmacosterminal

While I'm running some program in Terminal (or iTerm2), when the program forks the process, the OS X desktop switches focus from the current application to the forked process. When this happens, the forked process name shows in OS X menu bar.

This is especially annoying while using full screen mode as it causes the workspace to change when the forked process receives focus.

How can I stop this focus switch from happening? These terminal programs are interrupting the work I'm doing in other applications while they run.

Best Answer

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>
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