Option to focus main and floating windows when focusing back to the application

[axefrog]

Love that you added a native "Always on Top" toggle for secondary windows. Here's a variant pain point though:

I have a large monitor with space to breathe, so I often break out a file or two into a secondary window and place them to the side of the main VSCode window. If I then bring a different program into focus (e.g. Windows Terminal is a common one for me) it might be positioned to obscure the secondary VSCode window by some amount. When I switch back to VSCode I find myself wishing that the secondary window would also come back to the foreground as well. I don't need it to be "always on top", I just want my choice to bring VSCode back into focus to also include any secondary windows attached to it.

Possible setting:

Setting ID: window.surfaceAllInstanceWindowsOnRefocus
Hint Text: "Refocusing any VS Code window will also bring to the foreground all other windows belonging to that same VS Code instance"

Then reactivation of either the main window or any of its secondary windows will automatically bring all of them back to the surface. The actual pain point though is just that I like to have my notes on the side when I'm writing code. When I switch back to the code I want the notes to come back too. So whatever solution makes that possible would be a welcome addition to see in a future release.

[bpasero]

@axefrog this makes sense to me but would this also mean that the "main" window reveals when you focus into one of the secondary windows? And what about other "main" windows, should they remain where they are?

I think:

• given a set of main window and secondary windows that belong to that main window
• if you focus the main window or the secondary window
• bring main and related secondary windows to the top

However, this algorithm does not really work for the always-on-top option because it would be odd if the main window would show up when you interact with the secondary window 🤔

Maybe a variant is to only do this for the "main" window? I.e. only show all secondary windows of the "main" window when the "main" window gets focus?

[axefrog]

It was only the introduction of the "always on top" option that got me thinking. Its relevance to my suggestion ends there.

As to your question, I guess the simplest way of thinking about it is to just think of all of the windows of a given VSCode instance as part of the same group (which they are of course, given that closing the main windows closes the secondary windows as well). Therefore focusing any window in the group would surface all of the windows in the group. Focus one, focus all.

But I'd settle for "focus main, focus children too" if that's the easiest path. Conceptually it seems clearer to just treat them as a group as far as focus goes though.

[axefrog]

@bpasero Regarding "always on top" being in play at the same time, I notice that a secondary window flagged in this way will always be on top no matter what, so it doesn't really end up being part of the problem. My intuition about it is that clicking on that window would surface the whole group just the same as if it wasn't "always on top". In short I can't see one feature conflicting with the other in any relevant way.

[bpasero]

I think having a new setting to control this sounds good to me. I would begin with just moving all windows to the top when the main window is focused to see if that addresses all the cases before making this also behave this way when focussing secondary windows.

[axefrog]

The only nuance I imagine might need to be considered would be if the user arranges any secondary windows so that they're sitting above or below each other and/or the main window. So you'd want to keep track of the current stacking order of the various windows and make sure that's preserved when restoring focus.