gHacks technology news » application focus http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Prevent applications from stealing focus http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/04/prevent-applications-from-stealing-focus/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/04/prevent-applications-from-stealing-focus/#comments Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:07:57 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=3714 It happens several times a day that some applications steal the focus of the active window by popping up. This can happen for a number of reasons, when I extract files or a transfer finishes for instance. It does not matter most of the time when this happens but sometimes I’m writing an article and it does not only mean that I have to type some words again but also that I lost concentration and have to click to regain focus.

The Pro Reviewer website has a tip on how to prevent this from happening. The easiest way of preventing focus stealing is to use Tweak UI which has a setting that is called “Prevent applications from stealing focus”. Checking this option prevents that other applications pop up suddenly and steal the focus of the window you are currently working in.

This only works when the application has been minimized before. Instead of stealing the focus it will flash a number of times which can be defined in the same menu in Tweak UI. If you do not want to use Tweak UI you can change the setting in the Windows Registry.

Navigate to the Registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Control Panel > Desktop and change the ForegroundLockTimeout value to 30d40 (Hexadecimal) or 200000 (Decimal). The key ForeGroundFlashCount defines the amount of flashes of a window to alert the user where 0 means unlimited.

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