shell.openItem should activate the opened app

[sindresorhus]

• Electron version: 1.7.7
• Operating system: macOS 10.12.6

Expected behavior

For example, if I ask it to open a path to a directory, it should open it in Finder and focus the Finder window.

Actual behavior

It opens the Finder window in the background and my app window is still focused.

How to reproduce

shell.openItem('path/to/some/dir/');

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Focusing the opened app is expected behavior on macOS and should at least be an option.

The shell.openExternal method has this, so it's clear you agree. We just need the behavior/option added to this method too.

[MarshallOfSound]

Afaik this is because our implementation of openItem on macOS doesn't use NSWorkspace rather the now deprecated AE api's. This is due to a number of bugs with alternate implementations.

https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/master/atom/common/platform_util_mac.mm#L127

If you want to open it with activation I believe you can just pass the file path to openExternal

[sindresorhus]

/atom/common/platform_util_mac.mm@master#L127

The first mentioned issue there is fixed in Chromium. They're using NSWorkspace now: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/platform_util_mac.mm?l=30&rcl=975794ee43d7036fb94be988a9f6751db85c7a3a

If you want to open it with activation I believe you can just pass the file path to openExternal

Yes, that's my workaround, but it's ugly as it requires converting the path to a file URL.

[codebytere]

👋 @sindresorhus this fix is now in master, so i'm going to go ahead and close this issue!

[sindresorhus]

@codebytere Thank you for fixing this 🙌

[stanleyxu2005]

I noticed this bug for long time. And I can confirm it is still buggy for Windows 7 with (latest) Electron 8.2.0

[n-smits]

Works great on mac, but how about making it optional? :')
Boolean: should the app be activated (if the item was successfully opened), default true.

Use case: dev experience - working on a file exporter and would love to see the file live reload -- without having to cmd-tab back to the editor.

I suspect a work-around is possible through shell.openExternal as it has activate bool option.

As of now, it's possible just to omit the line (don't do any file opening) but keep the file open -> after saving in the editor, (vue on mounted) is hot reloaded and the file is overwritten, though to see changes you need to cmd-tab to refresh it.