How to keep an active window on top, and any eventual new window go behind active one

kdekde-4

One of the most annoying things that happen to me is when I work in a window, typically an editor, or a console, and some application suddenly starts and covers the currently active window… Is there a way to prevent this from happening? The environment is KDE 4.8 on Fedora 17. Windows actually behaves exactly as described above – new windows never pop-up above the currently active window, unless they belong to the same application and are dialogs.

However, if there is no activity in the active window, it would actually be helpful if the new window "takes-over". 🙂

Edit 1: I am looking for a general (preference) solution, if available. I am aware of the fact that I can modify window to be on top of everything.

Best Answer

Go to System Settings, and click through as follows:

System Settings
  \
  (section Workspace Appearance and Behavior)
   Window Behavior
     \
      (on left) Window Behavior (again)
        \
         (on top: Tab) Focus

Set "Focus Stealing Prevention Level" to "None".

For me this was set to "Low", and all new windows that already had started a window of the same type (e.g. Konsole, Firefox, gVim) would appear behind the active window. Setting to "None" resolved it.

This used to be working, for months even, but suddenly changed behavior a few days ago. I'm on a managed corporate Linux workstation, so this could have been a settings rollout by I.T., no idea. After changing that setting, new windows appear on top.

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