MacOS – X11 periodically losing focus

macosx11

I have a very annoying issue with the X11 app on OS X when using it to run things remotely over SSH. Every now and then (it's pretty regular, I'd say about each 1-2 minutes), the app I'm in loses focus, and the keyboard doesn't get sent to it anymore. However, X11 is still the foreground app.

Any ideas on what could be causing this and/or how to debug this?

Best Answer

`ssh`: wrong culprit

I have this loss of focus on a variable frequency on XQuartz without any ssh command.

On the other hand I found a heavy relationship between this XQuartz loss of focus and the launch of:

Google Software Update (com.google.Keystone.Agent)

Analysis of this bug

2 tools help during this investigation:

watch activations Python script →

[...]
2014-07-22 17:06:04.622 Python[95279:1307] activated Google Software Update (com.google.Keystone.Agent)
2014-07-22 17:06:08.410 Python[95279:1307] activated loginwindow (com.apple.loginwindow)
[...]

lastcomm | head -10 immediatly after the event →

[...]
diskmanage -S      root     __         0.00 secs Tue Jul 22 17:06 (0:00:18.03)
GoogleSoft -S      root     __         0.11 secs Tue Jul 22 17:06 (0:00:30.03)
[...]

Related Solutions

MacOS – Can’t quit app launched through launchd

If you don't specify <Minute> in the <StartCalendarInterval>, then (just like cron's *) it will run the job every minute.

MacOS – way to detect what program is stealing focus on the Mac

You can find the app that steals focus by saving the following code in a find_focus_stealer.py file and running it via python find_focus_stealer.py in a terminal.

Start running the script – it will print out the name of the active app every 3 seconds. Keep working as usual, wait for the problem to occur, and after a few seconds see the output in the terminal. You’ll have your culprit.

In my case it was a Symantec Antivirus background app (SymUIAgent.app).

#!/usr/bin/python

from AppKit import NSWorkspace
import time
t = range(1,100)
for i in t:
    time.sleep(3)
    activeAppName = NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace().activeApplication()['NSApplicationName']
    print activeAppName

Credits to iMichael_ in this Apple Discussions thread.