Allow for a way for a window to skip the pager.
I'm a little unclear on which part of GNOME handles window properties and application switching, so I apologise if I'm posting this to the wrong repo.
I've got a dual-screen setup where my laptop screen shows one consistent desktop and the primary monitor (big 4k) has 7 desktops I switch to for various reasons. I would like to have a movie or something playing on my laptop screen, but whenever I change from one desktop to another, GNOME switches focus to the movie app. The result is something like this:
- Workspace 5 (browser): hit
F5
to reload. -
Super+Up
to switch to workspace 4 (IDE) - Workspace 4 (IDE): type
query
Result: my movie quits because q
quits the app.
What I want is to do something like right-click on a window and toggle a flag like "exclude from focus" or whatever. This way I could do things like run a debugging terminal in one window, knowing that I can't accidentally switch focus to it, forcing me to fiddle with Alt+Tab
or the mouse.
Unfortunately, if this feature exists anywhere, I can't find it, and requests to help forums have been similarly unfruitful. My own research has resulted in a few discoveries though:
- With a little effort, this sort of thing is available in KDEland, though it's a bit buried (I'm not ragging on GNOME here, just trying to explain what I'm talking about with an example). You have to right-click on the title bar, go to
advanced window features
at which point you're presented with a new configuration window with 4 tabs. Under one of these tabs is two toggles forskip pager
andskip switcher
. Enabling both for the window in question excluded it fromAlt+Tab
. - With these phrases in-hand, I hopped into Firefox and did some digging for
"gnome" "skip pager"
and"gnome" "skip switcher"
. It looks like it does exist however only as C code for GTK and not a handy extension.
So that's why I'm here. As best I can tell, there is an API for this, but if there's a way for me to enable it, I don't know what it is. Could someone please add it as a "right click and toggle" sort of thing, or at least make it so that I could write a simple shell script to target a running window?
I would think it a relatively common use-case where someone on a dual-monitor (or just one big screen) setup might want to have one window that always gets focus and another which never should (like an IDE and debug output terminal for example). So I don't think I'd be the only one benefiting from something like this.