Feature To Prevent Apps From Stealing Focus

[drobin04]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

I would like to see a feature in PowerToys that strictly prevents either 'specific' applications, or 'all' applications, from forcibly setting themselves on top or changing themselves to be the active window, and instead just intercepts those calls and makes those apps flash in the taskbar.

Some applications are particularly egregious offenders of this behavior and may set themselves on top multiple times within short periods of time, I'd love it if PowerToys had an option to address this.

All of the solutions I could find for this typically suggest using an application to force another app to be always on top, rather than tackling the issue of preventing the offending app from setting itself on top or to the foreground instead.

A friend of mine was complaining about this to me recently, given that they regularly play League of Legends, and if they're in the champion select in that game, there's actually multiple points where the app will bring itself to the front, again and again, such that if they're tabbed out doing something else, they repeatedly have the focus change and keep having to switch back to the other window they were working on.

Scenario when this would be used?

There are numerous situations where this would be used, and there are a lot of threads about this topic out on the internet on various forums, with different solutions based on the Windows version, but after searching recently, I wasn't able to find a good solution that seemed as though it would work on Windows 10. Even if there is one, I think this would be a great setting to have either as its own feature or as a handy shortcut within PowerToys.

Supporting information

https://superuser.com/questions/18383/preventing-applications-from-stealing-focus

https://www.technipages.com/windows-10-prevent-apps-from-stealing-focus/

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/m1fsqp/how_does_one_stop_lol_from_stealing_window_focus/

https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/zc1uqv/how_does_one_stop_the_a_program_lol_client_from/?rdt=40635

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/452520/prevent-loss-of-window-focus/

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9000-mouse-hover-makes-window-active-enable.html

[similar-issues-ai]

We've found some similar issues:

• Stealing Focus Overload #19894 , similarity score: 81%
• PowerToys - Prevent Stealing Focus (Helpful for devs or windows terminal users) #29073 , similarity score: 81%
• Prevent other apps from stealing focus from the current app #15916 , similarity score: 81%

If any of the above are duplicates, please consider closing this issue out and adding additional context in the original issue.

Note: You can give me feedback by 👍 or 👎 this comment.

[TheJoeFin]

/dup #65

[microsoft-github-policy-service]

Hi! We've identified this issue as a duplicate of another one that already exists on this Issue Tracker. This specific instance is being closed in favor of tracking the concern over on the referenced thread. Thanks for your report!