Hey Eric,

Finally figured this out.

Apparently this is a 'feature' of KWin (KDE window manager), and exists to not allow windows to randomly take focus when you're working on something else.

So KWin has special settings to tweak this, I'm sure there's something similar for SuSE.

You have 2 options:

Completely disable this feature from KWin. (they don't recommend, but I guess it depends on what kind of shady apps you have installed)

In system settings->Window Management->Window Behavior->Focus->Focus stealing prevention set to None

Set specific settings based on window names. This is better(safer?), but more annoying. For some reason KWin doesn't seem to recognize all windows as part of the same application.

So for every Chimera window that you open:

Right click the top taskbar(or ALT-F3)->More Actions->Special Application settings->Appearances & Fixes->Focus stealing prevention-> set to force 'None'

Also go to the tab `Window matching` and uncheck the match whole window class, and change exact match to unimportant

then make Window title Exact match, and use the window title of the chimera window that you're on (like 'Model Panel')

You might have to restart chimera. and now it works for me!

Cheers,

Dan

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 4:29 PM, Eric Pettersen <pett@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

Hi Daniel,
I don’t think there is anything we can do to change this behavior. When you click on that icon, Chimera asks the Tk toolkit to bring that window to the front (via a “tkraise” call). I have no idea what window system calls Tk makes to try to accomplish that, but apparently they don’t work on your distro. They do work on an Ubuntu installation we have here, but a SuSE installation worked in a somewhat similar fashion to yours except that all the Chimera dialogs were in one tab in the linux toolbar, and clicking on that tab would bring up a menu of the dialogs and picking one would bring it to the front.
I think your only option is to use the linux toolbar to bring the dialog you want to the front.

—Eric

Eric Pettersen
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

On Sep 27, 2017, at 3:17 PM, Daniel P Farrell <danpf@uw.edu> wrote:

Hello,
I'm not sure if this is a distro thing, but I'm on linux mint and when I click on something in the toolbar the first time, the window appears on top of the main chimera window. However, if the window is already open, now the window no longer is brought to the front, and instead lights up on the linux application toolbar.

Would it be possible/easy to change this so that when I click on the toolbar and the window is already open for it to be brought to the front?

It seems to already work this way on mac.

NAME="Linux Mint"
VERSION="18.1 (Serena)"
ID=linuxmint

Cheers,
Dan
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