I always make my current working window full screen under i3. It works great most of the time. I just observed that it has conflicts with floating windows that i3 will put floating windows behind the full-screen window.
My question is whether there is anyway to force floating windows staying on top, even before a full-screen window?
Posted Oct 6, 2017, 6:45 PM UTC
This would violate the idea and specification of fullscreen (although the latter could be argued), so no, it's not possible.
Unless you make it an override redirect window. But the application has to know how to deal with that, which most probably don't.
I agree with what you said. On the other hand, even for full-screen windows, users would still like certain important notification windows to be put on the top of the full-screen one. Like in my case, the window being hidden is the gpg password input dialog box. I would like to see it under any layout mode.
What exactly triggers you to enter a password while you are doing something fullscreen (assuming it's not your mail client that is fullscreened)? This typically requires some user-initiated action, which shouldn't be happening on that workspace if there is a fullscreen going on.
Notifications in general will typically be displayed since notification daemons like dunst use override redirect windows for that, by the way.
The fullscreen application is tmux terminal, and mutt is running inside it. At times, I switch to the mutt panel to process an email. An pinentry window will be prompted to ask for passphrase when sending an email.
You are right. The pinentry password window is not a notification per se.
Is there a specific reason to use tmux in fullscreen and not just in a separate workspace?
Another option would be a rule to disable fullscreen when a floating window (or even just the pinentry window, specifically) pops up. With some scripting you could even change this to automatically re-enable fullscreen afterwards (I have something similar for when I open a floating window manually while there is a fullscreen window).
This is probably not possible without editing the source code
Edit: you might want to look into the command wmctrl. Specifically wmctrl -a
Edit 2: This might help you as well
Thanks! I did some search, and found people asked such similar questions here before... seems no good solutions so far. Will check out
wmctrlwhen have time, :)I tried out the
wmctrlapproach, but it does not work, :(. What I did is to set a floating window to be on top using wmctrl first, then move it to a workspace with a full-screen app. The floating window will still be put behind the full-screen one by i3.