Questions[focus](ubuntu)

I would like to configure Ubuntu 20.04 (with Gnome shell) so that if I click a window which does not have focus, that click raises the window and does nothing else; in particular, that click to raise the window does not actually have an effect on the window (so I can click where a button is without activating that button). In the old days on the Mac this, clicks triggering actions in background windows, was called "click-through"; it's the default in GNOME Shell and I'd like to disable it.

The reason for this is that it is very hard to click on a window to raise it without also clicking on a button inside it!

Almost all the visible areas of that Nautilus window are "active" areas in some way; clicking in that window to focus and raise it will also change the folder that it is currently displaying.

Some clarifications:

1. This is not about the window focus mode (focus-follows-mouse or sloppy focus). Windows are focused by clicking on them; I do not want focus-follows-mouse, and it is not what this question is about.
2. This is about raising a window and giving it the focus by clicking on the window. I can switch to that window in other ways (alt-tab, for example, or by choosing it from the Dock) but I want to be able to click on a window to focus it and raise it, exactly as I currently can, but I don't want to have to be careful to only click on an "inactive" area of that window to focus it.
3. Yes, this problem is exacerbated by how there are not very many "inactive" areas in a window now that the title bar contains buttons. That's not what this question is about, and I am quite happy with the window containing many buttons, as long as I'm not forced to click one of them just in order to give the window focus.

I am informed by Mattias Wernér that Super+Click does exactly this (raises a window without the click being received by the window itself), which is great, and so it is possible that this question should be rephrased as "how do I make click on unfocused windows do what Super+click does?".

I updated from 16.04 LTS to 18.04 last year, and the Gnome notifications are a nuisance. In 16.04 with Unity, notifications would not grab focus, they'd just appear as an overlay in the corner -- you couldn't even click on them. In 18.04 with Gnome, when a notification pops up, it grabs focus from the current window. This is really disruptive, since I routinely have to monitor multiple chat channels that send notifications to me. I'll be in the middle of typing something in one channel when a notification from another interrupts, causing me to type several letters into the void before I manually get the cursor back where it's supposed to be, completely breaking my flow.

I definitely need to be aware of the notifications as they come in, so I can't just block, mute, or hide them, but I don't want them to interrupt what I'm doing when they appear. Is there a way to do this that I'm overlooking? I'd prefer a built-in/official solution over one that requires installing a patch or mod, if possible.

Typical situation is that I type something (worst case is my password) in some application, when some other application pops up a window and steals the focus, so my typing (password) goes to something else. I would like to prevent this, at least when I actively type something in an edit box. I always really hated this on Windows, but I never found a way to prevent this. I started using Ubuntu a while ago, and so far I was able to do everything I wanted, so I thought maybe this is also possible. Thanks in advance!

From the GConf key description:

The window focus mode indicates how windows are activated. It has three possible values; "click" means windows must be clicked in order to focus them, "sloppy" means windows are focused when the mouse enters the window, and "mouse" means windows are focused when the mouse enters the window and unfocused when the mouse leaves the window.

When I configure focus_mode using gconf-editor, /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode, I can't tell the difference between mouse and sloppy.

When I set this key as mouse, the focus is still on that window if I hover the cursor to the background.

I'm using Maverick with Compiz enabled.

I've searched AskUbuntu and Google. AskUbuntu doesn't have anything on this topic and everything Google turns up is a couple years old.

I'm doing browser tests and my tests are constantly spawning new Firefox windows. The problem is, when the window is spawned it takes focus. This is incredibly annoying as I'm usually in the middle of typing somewhere else. This doesn't only happen with my tests, but is the most common example I run into. Sometimes my IDE decides it wants focus when something special happens (like when something is done compiling) and then later I'll find fragments of IM messages I've typed in my code. This is driving me crazy. I've looked in both Gnome settings and Compiz settings and can't find a way to prevent that from happening.

Does anyone know of a way to prevent an app from stealing focus when it is opened? I'd rather have the taskbar flash at me or something to get my attention.