pop-os
Wish: Please add Focus Stealing prevention
This is a wishlist item, and it's my hope that this feature will be something worthwhile and will help others. I can't be the only person dealing with this.
In Pop!_Shell, if an app shows any kind of notification or state change, it's often the case that the user will be forced away from what they're working on, and taken to a completely different workspace. I'm going to outline what occurs with a hypothetical example, and then I'll link to a video that actually shows this happening.
Example: On workspace A, I'm using GNOME terminal, and getting some work done.
On workspace B, I have Firefox open.
With workspace A being my current one, perhaps Firefox shows an alert. While typing commands into the terminal, I'm forcefully taken away from my terminal and then the workspace switcher automatically takes me to workspace B, even though I didn't ask for my workspace to be switched.
I find this bug to bite me multiple times per day, and it makes it difficult to get work done.
This wish item is to add the ability to disable focus stealing, so that way I can disallow any workspace switching that I didn't myself initiate. Perhaps a toggle in settings. Or, perhaps block focus stealing altogether because I can't imagine why anyone would welcome frequent interruptions to their work.
(For what it's worth, macOS has this exact same problem and it's 10x worse).
Here's a video file of this problem happening. In this scenario, I'm typing in a text editor. On another workspace, I have Audacity running a macro. My intent is for the audio processing to run in the background, and I don't wish to see Audacity again until I go to check on it. However, as soon as the macro moves on to another step, it pulls me away from my text editor (literally in the middle of typing a sentence!) and forces me to look at Audacity:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5324220/179052439-2b7b24a6-fb08-4398-aa55-739cef4a5eb6.mp4
For me, this happens with any app that requests my attention. This includes (but isn't limited to) Firefox, Thunderbird, Audacity (as shown in the video), or pretty much anything else that shows an alert within the app itself (normal GNOME notifications don't seem to ever trigger this).
Hopefully this resonates and someone with development talent might want to take this on if it's not too difficult to fix.
