Fluxbox fullscreen windows grab focus (stay on top)

[Member blur13]

Hi!

Sorry for the repeat if anyone also reads the MX forums. I was trying out MX fluxbox, then realized antiX also has fluxbox. I get the same erratic behaviour on antiX as well, so might as well try asking here to see if anyone has a solution. I’m trying to configure fluxbox and a few things are bothering me. If I make a window fullscreen then any subsequent window will open behind it. Ie I open my terminal and hit alt+F11 to make it fullscreen, and enter “geany textdocument.txt” then the command will run but nothing happens, or so it appears. In fact, the geany window has emerged behind the fullscreen window. So I have to alt-tab to bring it to focus. If I have firefox in fullscreen mode and hit a keyboard shortcut to open my music player it will open behind firefox. Is this intended behaviour of fullscreen windows in fluxbox? (Maximised windows behave as expected, with new windows grabbing focus and auto-raised).

Another thing is that alt-tabing when a window is fullscreen is that the conky window appears, I’d expect that to always be in the background. Its not “selectable”, it just sort of hovers. Anyone else get this? Any solutions?

thanks!

[Member iznit]

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conky, there is a config setting something like “show in own window or not”. Uncheck or disable, so it won’t show in own window [[[and crossfingers won’t show up in alt+tab rotation]]]

fluxbox, read the manpage. Especially the section titled “Focus Model”.

Focus New Windows
If enabled, a new window will grab X focus as soon as it is opened.

If your ~/.fluxbox/init file does now already contains this
session.screen0.focusNewWindows: true
…..if not, add or edit that line. That’s the only choice, true or false. If true, and firefox and certain other fullscreen [[[aka currently windowless]]] applications are hogging focus, you can set

session.screen0.fullMaximization: false
so any fullscreen window cannot cover the fluxbox toolbar. That way, you will see visual confirmation that a new window has successfully opened and can click in toolbar to access it [[[ vs hunting through alt+tab to find its window ]]]

[Member iznit]

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Uncheck or disable, so conky won’t show in own window

I mention “uncheck” because a MX user may have been using a gui “conky manager” to change conky settings instead of directly editing the configuration file.

[Member blur13]

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iznit,

Thanks for your help! Unfortunately it didn’t work. The line session.screen0.focusNewWindows: true was already present. Autoraise is also on. Everything works as expected when windows are not fullscreen. Fullscreen in window managers must have some special meaning I’m not aware of. I thought it was simply “maximized with no decorations”, but it seems to be more than that. In Fluxbox it seems to be 100% focus. In icewm I know that the new tiling options won’t work on fullscreen windows. I think my best option is to simply remove decorations (I have no need for the title bar) and use maximized as the new fullscreen.

Even the conky issue disappears when using maximized instead of fullscreen. It probably has something to do with layers. If I set the window layer to “desktop” and maximize then the conky will show “through” the window. So my theory is that a fullscreen window gets assigned layer “top”, and when its not in focus it gets assigned layer “desktop”.

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