It's all in the title - every time I need to enter a password to unlock a kwallet, I have to go grab the dialog from somewhere behind the window requesting the encrypted information. That's beginning to get old; how come these windows open in the background systematically, and what could be done about it?

Thanks,
René

It is likely OS X is preventing KWallet from taking focus - whether it is possible to workaround this though will depend on how OS X handles window management. It is also probable that the usual mechanism used on X based systems doesn't work on OS X, so the application isn't able to raise KWallet above itself.

I'm assuming you don't have any focus stealing preferences available?

If you mean do I have any gadgets installed to mess with OS X's focus mechanism: no, I don't.

So how exactly do things work on X11 - is it the calling app that raises the kwallet window, or is it kwallet itself? If the former, and presuming that the wallet window handle is retrieved correctly by the calling app, we might be looking at a bug in Qt, but I'm guessing it's kwallet who decides whether or not it is even necessary to present a password entry window when an app asks for a stored password ...
I have almost 0 experience programming Qt (and even less with the KDE API), but I presume both must provide functions to raise and lower windows that have been tested. However, OS X tries to implement a layered environment where a raised window doesn't necessarily always raise to the top. What is needed here is to become the key window, the one receiving keyboard event.

In my book, it'd be perfectly OK for kwallet to open a toplevel key window each time it needs a wallet password to be entered. That's also how the OS X keychain works. (In fact, even on Linux it might try a bit harder to lose entry focus to anyone but another of its own windows!)

Alternatively: there's a Qt library (QtKeyChain) that allows interfacing with the OS X keychain. Might be an idea to look into (optionally, at the user's choice) handing off all password management to Keychain, through some backend mechanism? It'll resolve the issue at hand, and more in general OS X users might be more interested in the iCloud sync and other OS integration that allows rather than the possibility to share the wallets with a Linux install

QtKeychain would be something worth mentioning to the KDE Frameworks 5 developers possibly. It is unlikely such invasive changes would be made at this stage to the KDE 4 series.

I'm afraid i'm not familiar with the specifics of how it works under X11 - I do know it involves passing of Window ID's though. My guess would be that the relevant OS X parts are not implemented in the KDE Libraries used to change the focus, or KWallet doesn't attempt to become the "key" window.

I'm afraid you'll need to report a bug at bugs.kde.org against kwallet.