"Always on Top" steals focus on workspace switch
Affected version
Provide at least the following information:
- Fedora Linux 35
- Gnome 41.5
- Visible in XOrg (perhaps also in wayland)
Bug summary
- Two windows A and B in workspace W.
- Set A to be "always on top".
- Set focus on B (and work on it).
- Switch to a workspace different from W.
- Switch back to workspace W.
- The focus is in A.
Expected behavior:
Upon returning to X, the expected behavior is to find the focus in the last window having it. Following the previous example, B.
Why is this an issue
Many times, the kind of windows that we want to leave "always on top" are windows containing information that we are using in another window, or containing volatile elements that we need to constantly see (in the visual sense).
Examples of this are:
- A small text file with a list of items
- A timer
- A video player
- A terminal with some real-time tracking...
The reason those windows are set "always on top" is to be able to see them when you work in other window B, avoiding to visually cover A. Therefore, the interest of the user is to WORK on B, in other words, to keep the keyboard and mouse inputting data to B.
Visiting another workspace should not magically imply a change in the organization of the current workspace.
More over, the concept of "visually placing a window on top" has nothing to do with the concept of "working on that window".
You can see it as an analogy to the pipes in a shell: If you (the human) are a process "reading" from another process (the window A), and writing to another process (window B); upon Workspace switch, your current pipe
A | You | B
is forcefully changed to
A | You | A
Gnome-Shell forces you to read information from A, and also write it to A. That doesn't make any sense.