For a while I have been irritated by XFCE notifications being always system-modal -- that is that they pop up on top of every other window and grab focus from all windows. Does anybody know of a way to stop them stealing focus?
This is particularly annoying, for example, when doing things like running multimedia applications from a terminal and having a volume display pop up afterwards taking the focus from the terminal.
I'm running Debian Sid 64 bit on both my laptop and desktop but as far as I can tell this is an XFCE thing not a distribution thing.

Don't know if it's an answer to your question but under the "Window Manager Tweaks" / "Focus" tab there's a checkbox to "Activate focus stealing prevention", and another for "When a window raises itself: Do Nothing"

Thanks, just checked and I already have those set but it doesn't seem to help, sadly.

no, the notification popups are much more persistent than that and i always felt that they don't behave properly.
when i was still using some sort of desktop environment, i managed to simply disable it by
1) uninstalling xfce4-notifyd
2) now some package would complain that it cannot find any notification daemon, so i placed an empty file "notifyd" somewhere under /usr/lib (don't remember the details) and made it executable.

what a terrible hack!

later i found out that there is different notification daemons, so i'd have had more options then the sledgehammer.
xfce4 should be able to use a different one.

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Thanks, I'll take a look into replacing xfce4-notifyd, I'd not thought of that. I seem to recall that a while back I was using something else come to think of it.

look for a package/program called notify-send, iirc, and see what it does.
i think it was the one responsible for sending the notifications to the daemon.
so basically you could tellit to use something else.

edit:
i just tried it, it's not exactly what i described.
stillm ight help you to get on the right track.

it now looks as if there's another xfce notification app:
http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/app...on-daemon-xfce

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Thanks, I now realise I have done this before. I installed notify-osd and uninstalled xfce4-notifyd now the notifications are a bit silly-looking (to my eye) but a lot less intrusive. Now I'll have to find out how to configure notify-osd since the configuration tool doesn't seem to be present in Debian but I know I'm on the right lines now.