I noticed this phenomenon in Nedit. Maybe it occurs with other applications as well.

If I have Nedit working in several windows, opening one of its dialogues, for example, the search dialogue, naturally puts the search dialogue box on top. It also puts all the other Nedit windows on top.

This started happening when I updated to KDE version 4.00.00, without changing the Nedit version (5.5).

This feature is unhelpful. If I am looking at a terminal window and a Nedit window, for example to correlate program output with the code, I want to continue to see the terminal window when I put something into the Nedit search dialogue, not have the terminal window covered with a dozen Nedit windows.

Is this a KDE "feature" or should I look elsewhere for a solution?

If it is a KDE feature, how can I turn it off?

I've not experience this, but i don't use Nedit. Does Nedit run as a single instance even when multiple windows are opened?

You could try playing with the Nedit's widows' focus: right click Nedit title bar -> special application settings -> advanced -> appearance settings & fixes -> focus (there are 2 focus options)

I assume if you used tabs instead of windows for editing sessions you would not have this happen but it is not your workflow preference

you could use Kedit with the terminal plugin or separate terminals even

I poked around "Windows Specific" settings, but was unable to change the behavior. gedit does the same thing. nedit uses one process for all its windows. gedit appears to do so as well. I don't know what category of box/window nedit and gedit use for dialogues, such as "find." Maybe KDE 4.0 treats this kind of box differently from how KDE 3.5 did. This behavior does not occur in KDE 3.5, with the same version of nedit (5.5), so it seems to be a new KDE "feature," not something that nedit and gedit decided to do. The version on my KDE 4.0 machine is a newer build (8 July 2010 instead of 1 Oct 2004) of the same nedit version, using Motif 2.3.3 instead of Motif 2.1.30. But... when I use the old nedit build on KDE 4.0, it still tops all of its windows when a dialogue box is opened -- so it seems to be KDE that does it, not nedit, not Motif. Or maybe it is Motif: Both nedit builds are dynamically linked.

Have you tried increasing or decreasing the focus stealing prevention level in System Settings?

Yes, I've tried every focus-stealing level. At "none," all of nedit's windows are topped as soon as a dialogue box is opened. At "extreme," the windows aren't topped when the dialogue box is opened, but they're all topped as soon as anything is done to the dialogue box, such as clicking in a panel to enter data.

I've moved this to the KWin forum now so they can take a look.
I suspect that Nedit is doing something non-standard which causes this behaviour when combined with KWin.

ever tried kate/kwrite?
/advert =)

On topic:
i get the nedit window related to the dialog raised. That's intended since the dialog is a transient and the general strategy is to not have unrelated windows between a transient and its leader (consider the case where you'd open the file dialog from konqueror and a kwrite window would be right below - you'd naturally expect opening in kwrite)

I'm not sure but cannot recall it would have been different in KDE3 times.

If *all* nedit (main)windows (ie. editors) raise that's either a bug in kwin or in nedit (reg. setting window hints)

Very important:
what's your actual KDE version *now* (for 4.0.0 is really old and might just be buggy in that regard - yes)
If your version is 4.9 or 4.10 please provide the output of

Code: Select all

qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin supportInformation

(enter that in konsole) so we can check whether this particular behavior is eventually related to certain settings.

My current KDE version, in Scientific Linux 6.4 (Carbon), is 4.3.4.

ALL of nedit's windows do get topped when a dialogue box is opened. So do ALL of gedit's windows. I've tried the same nedit version on different KDE versions. I don't have the problem with nedit (haven't tried gedit) on antique KDE versions. My version of nedit is dynamically linked. The bug is either in KDE (4.3.4, maybe corrected by now in newer versions) or the shared libraries that nedit and gedit have in common:

/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000003c6e800000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x0000003c6ec00000)libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x0000003c6f400000)
libexpat.so.1 => /lib64/libexpat.so.1 (0x0000003c73400000)
libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x0000003c73c00000)
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libfreetype.so.6 (0x0000003c73000000)
libICE.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libICE.so.6 (0x0000003c74c00000)
libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x0000003c6f000000)
libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib64/libpng12.so.0 (0x0000003c72800000)
libSM.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libSM.so.6 (0x0000003c74800000)
libuuid.so.1 => /lib64/libuuid.so.1 (0x0000003c72c00000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libX11.so.6 (0x0000003c71400000)
libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libXau.so.6 (0x0000003c70800000)
libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libxcb.so.1 (0x0000003c70c00000)

If you don't have the problem with nedit/gedit on newer versions of KDE, then there's no need to pursue it further. If so, I just need to hold my breath until RedHat/CentOS/Scientific Linux etc. include a sufficiently new KDE in their distributions. My SA won't install anything they don't support, and I don't have the root password for my computer.

kwrite doesn't open a dialogue box for "Find", so it doesn't have the problem.

No, 4.10 does not show this behavior. Unfortunately i cannot even say when it was fixed.