#29 possible issue in window spawning

[John Doe]

With awesome 4 window manager worker sometimes spawns second selection box(for example when deleting directory and choosing "delete? okay" "delete recursively?" "yes") without switching focus to it. So you can't use keyboard to interact with the second box, you have to first manually focus it with mouse or otherwise.
Problem isn't showing up in dwm, previous awesome, xfce, gnome, kde, or any other wms i used, however awesome wm people insist that the problem lies with worker.

Just something you might want to look into.

[Ralf Hoffmann]

Explicitly setting the focus is possible but often not the best idea since the window manager knows best how the user wants this to happen. For instance, some window manger can be configured so that the window under the mouse has the focus no matter what. Enforcing the focus will not be what the users wanted in this case. Of course the window manager can decide to revert the focus but fighting with the window manager is not a good idea either.

I basically only set the focus manually for popup menus and let the window manager decide for all other windows.
However, I set the window property _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE to _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DIALOG which should basically tell the window manager that this window is supposed to be a short-living dialog so the window manager can decide to give this window focus regardless of other settings.
This is a well-defined standard behavior (https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest/ar01s05.html#idm139870830002400) even though it is not defined what the window manager has to do with this information.
If you have some information what kind of properties I should set for new windows, I'm happy to add those as well.
If you experienced these problems only for some but not all windows, please tell me which ones are opened correctly and which ones not so I might look into that direction.

[John Doe]

The thing is, it happens only about 1/5 of all times dialog is spawned(and also only with double dialogoue popup, single popups work fine). So on a first glance it screams some sort of synchronisation issue. Perhaps dialog window is processed by the window manager before the window property is set? Is it created with the property, or do you have separate function for setting that?

Otherwise i don't know anything about awesome or worker internals, but probably the problem is with awesome.