qpdfview not auto-focusing when openning a document

Hello Tohiko,

I guess this is not what you want to hear but I think this depends on the window manager, i.e. in your case it will bring a newly started application to the foreground but it will not honor the request of an already running application which is a common default to avoid programs pushing themselves into the foreground in an irritating manner. I am not sure which desktop environment your are running exactly, but GNOME Tweak Tool or dropping down to using dconf-editor and looking for settings related to Mutter might yield something useful.

Best regards,
Adam

Yes, I am using GNOME 3. I will dig in the settings.

I wasn't sure if qpdfview is making that request, since other applications like emacsclient (which should bring an emacs instance to the front) do not suffer from the same issue.

This might also be related to another issue that I am having where running emacsclient from the terminal brings it to the front while running it from qpdfview (as a source editor) does not. I am wondering these "requests" that qpdfview is making to the WM are not compatible with GNOME 3.

Hello again,

qpdfview uses Qt's raise [1] and activateWindow [2] methods to request being put into the foreground. It could be that emacsclient is doing that via Gtk which is properly supported. Maybe trying another Qt application like VLC gives more insight?

Best regards,
Adam

[1] https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qwidget.html#raise

[2] https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qwidget.html#activateWindow

Hi,

I have the same issue with Mate desktop/Marco Window Manager. Mate is based on Gnome2. I'm thinking maybe the activatewindow is not getting handled correctly?

Here's what I did as a workaround.

1. I renamed the qpdfview binary to qpdfviewbin

2.I created a script called qpdfview containing the following.

#!/bin/bash -e
qpdfviewbin $1 $2
/usr/bin/xdotool search --name " - qpdfview" windowactivate

It seems to work nicely. Of course it'd be better to not need this hack.