Preventing applications Stealing Focus

Question

Are there any solutions to prevent applications stealing focus from the active window? This is especially annoying when I'm starting an application, switch to do something else and the new application starts receiving half a sentence of text.

Answer 1

There is an option in TweakUI which does this. It prevents most of the usual tricks dubious software developers employ to force focus on their app.

It's an ongoing arms war though, so I don't know if it works for everything.

_{Update: According to EndangeredMassa, TweakUI does not work on Windows 7.}

Answer 2

Ghacks has a possible solution:

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.

Answer 3

The standard way to disable applications stealing focus is to :

1. Use regedit to go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.
2. Double-click on ForegroundLockTimeout and set its value in hexadecimal to 30d40.
3. Press OK and exit regedit.
4. Reboot your PC for the changes to take effect.

From this point forward, programs should (in theory) no longer steal the focus from the window that you're currently working in. Although this is the documented solution, it may not always work for everybody.

Another possibility is the MS-Windows focus-follows-mouse Registry hacks, where the focus and/or activation goes always to the windows under the cursor.