GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 673399
Dialog boxes, missing from overlay, can be impossible to find/focus
Last modified: 2013-08-26 15:36:16 UTC
Seen this in 3.4, 3.2, and 3.0 as well if I'm not mistaken. This happens with a number of dialog boxes, some from gnome components, some from other programs. It's most trivially reproducable with zenity: Steps to reproduce: 1) From a terminal, run: zenity --info & (note the ampersand, to put this into the background) 2) Notice the dialog box. 3) Exit the terminal, leaving the dialog active. 4) Open another window, say, gedit. 4) Raise and move gedit above the dialog box. 5) Attempt to find/select the dialog box, pretending you hadn't noticed it before. You'll find that it's not selectable by alt-tab, it's not in the overlay, and it's not on the left launcher bar. It's virtually impossible to ever find again... unless you happen to close gedit, or move it in just the right way.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 650843 ***
Actually, I think this is a different case, since I'm seeing it with dialog boxes that have no "parent" window. They're not even modal windows, as described in that defect.
This is caused by GtkMessageDialog having the skip-taskbar true by default, even if the dialog is parentless. This is kind of broken, but I think we can't change gtk+ for compatibility reasons. Instead, we can workaround it in mutter.
Created attachment 253127 [details] [review] window: ignore skip-taskbar hint on parentless dialogs Dialogs that don't have a parent should not be skip-taskbar, otherwise they get lost and there is no way to recover them (because they're not autoraised when activating the parent), but toolkits and applications set the hint anyway.
Review of attachment 253127 [details] [review]: OK.
Attachment 253127 [details] pushed as eeed3d6 - window: ignore skip-taskbar hint on parentless dialogs