Prevent terminal alert notifications from stealing focus, or add a supported toggle

[shbernal]

Omarchy is increasingly a good environment for terminal-heavy and agent-heavy workflows. One small sharp edge is that terminal alert notifications can steal focus.

On current Omarchy defaults, Hyprland has:

misc = {
  focus_on_activate = true,
}

Terminals are already tagged in default/hypr/apps/terminals.lua:

o.window("(Alacritty|kitty|com.mitchellh.ghostty|foot)", { tag = "+terminal" })

That means terminal apps that emit BEL/OSC-style alerts can request activation. In practice, this can pull focus away from the current window when a background TUI wants attention.

A concrete example is Codex CLI. Codex currently emits terminal notifications for turn completion and permission requests. I opened a Codex feature request for a native Linux/Freedesktop/libnotify backend here:

openai/codex#26801

That is the right upstream fix for Codex. But this class of problem is broader than Codex: long-running TUIs, coding agents, terminal multiplexers, and shell tools often use terminal alerts for "done" or "needs input".

A low-impact Omarchy default could be:

-- default/hypr/apps/terminals.lua
o.window({ tag = "terminal" }, { focus_on_activate = false })

This seems consistent with the existing Telegram rule:

-- Prevent Telegram from stealing focus on new messages.
o.window("org.telegram.desktop", { focus_on_activate = false })

I think this would be a good default because terminal alerts should be allowed to signal attention, but should not take over the user's active work context.

If this is too opinionated as a default, could Omarchy support it as a small toggle or documented common tweak? For example:

• a Hyprland toggle for "terminal alerts do not steal focus"; or
• a short manual recipe that adds the terminal focus_on_activate = false rule; optionally noting terminal-specific settings such as kitty's window_alert_on_bell no.

Local workaround that worked for me:

o.window({ tag = "terminal" }, { focus_on_activate = false })

and for kitty:

window_alert_on_bell no

The Omarchy-side ask is intentionally narrow: not native Codex notifications, not a global change to every app, just making terminal attention behavior less disruptive by default or supported through an Omarchy-sanctioned tweak.