How do I make a window move to the top of other windows in Gnome when that window already has the focus?

Question

I have an application that sends the focus to other windows but those windows then don't automatically display themselves in the foreground, i.e. on top of all the other windows. Where can I configure the preferences of my window manager so that this is the default behaviour?

In particular I'm using the Ctrl-0 and Ctrl-Shft-0 shortcuts in the MATLAB IDE to move between the command window and the editor window and although the focus seems to be transferred the new window doesn't automatically redraw itself in the foreground.

Thanks

Answer 1

Usually when the window doesn't repaint, it means that the application's main application loop isn't running to refresh the window. Could it be that Matlab is doing some computation or disk activity when you are switching between windows?

Answer 2

Not sure of a key binding off hand that does it, but if you alt-click on a window (which allows you to drag a window) it should come to the front.

As codeDr suggests, MATLAB is also kind of bad about repainting its windows. If you draw to a figure while code is executing, the figure does not update unless you execute drawnow or have some similar pause in the execution to allow the GUI to repaint. Since we're talking about MATLAB, the figure command will also cause the indicated figure to come to the front (in fact, it's harder to get it to not come to the front). So you could do figure(gcf) to bring the current figure to the front, or save the figure number with h = figure; and then later do figure(h). Incidentally, if you want to switch current figures without switching focus, set(0, 'CurrentFigure', h) should set h to the current figure.

Answer 3

Your window manager (probably Metacity?) implements focus-stealing prevention so that rogue apps don't pop up windows that would disturb your typing. Matlab needs to raise its window, and give it the input focus with the correct timestamp. If this is being done from a KeyPress event handler, the timestamp for setting the input focus would be the timestamp from the KeyPress event (i.e. the timestamp of the user-generated event that caused a window to be raised/focused).

To politely give the input focus to a window, google for _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW.