Feature request: Mechanism to ignore/suppress programmatic XWayland focus grabs (_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW / XSetInputFocus)

[Malphur09]

Use Case / Problem Description

Currently, window-rule provides on-xdg-activate "ignore", which works as intended for native Wayland clients attempting to snatch focus using xdg-activation-v1.

However, legacy X11 / XWayland applications (particularly Java/Compose Multiplatform desktop apps, Electron, or older media suites) do not request activation tokens cooperatively. Instead, they fire programmatic X11 focus requests (_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW or direct XSetInputFocus calls) through xwayland-satellite.

On multi-monitor setups, this allows an XWayland background window (e.g., a media player auto-advancing to the next episode) to rip keyboard focus away from an active Wayland/XWayland surface (such as a game or full-screen editor) on another display output.

Proposed Solution

Introduce a window rule or global toggle to suppress programmatic focus attempts originating specifically from XWayland surfaces unless triggered by explicit pointer/user action:

window-rule {
    match app-id="^com-nuvio-app-MainKt$"
    // Proposed syntax/behavior:
    ignore-xwayland-focus true
    // or extending on-xdg-activate:
    // on-xwayland-activate "ignore"
}

[YaLTeR]

Question for xwayland-satellite. niri does not treat it as any special client, it has no knowledge of anything xwayland related.

[Malphur09]

Understood, thanks for clarifying the boundary, I'll close this here and bring the feature request to the xwayland-satellite repo.