Quickly tell loading program to appear in background?

[iamvoyager]

I don't imagine any such feature exists, but it finally occurred to me that there is probably a very common annoyance among multitaskers - you click on some program you want to run, but then you immediately go on to clicking other programs and such while you wait for the first program to load.... but in such instances, you probably don't want the first program to interfere with whatever you are trying to click through next...

Wouldn't it be nice if there were some way we could define a key-combination which, when entered, causes the last application to load in the background (instead of popping up in front of you, just going to the window list panel)?

[i92guboj]

I don't imagine any such feature exists, but it finally occurred to me that there is probably a very common annoyance among multitaskers - you click on some program you want to run, but then you immediately go on to clicking other programs and such while you wait for the first program to load.... but in such instances, you probably don't want the first program to interfere with whatever you are trying to click through next...

Wouldn't it be nice if there were some way we could define a key-combination which, when entered, causes the last application to load in the background (instead of popping up in front of you, just going to the window list panel)?

The responsible for focus policies is your window manager. So, unless it provides a way to do so, you are going to have a hard time to achieve this.

Also, note that some applications don't acknowledge the icccm/ewmh standard and like to mess up with the focus and cause some other funny artifacts (hello, java), so, no one can guarantee that a given application will behave well.

In fvwm for example it would be trivial to bind key combos to change the focus policy. You can also configure it to act differently for different windows. I doube you can achieve anything similar with simpler wm's like the gnome one (metacity). Kwin has some advanced features but it is not as configurable as fvwm either.