How do you force a java swt program to "move itself to the foreground"?

http://github.com/rdp/redcar/commit/d7dfeb8e77f13e5596b11df3027da236f23c83f0

shows how I did it in windows, anyway (using ffi).

A couple of helpful tricks "may" be

add a 'sleep 0.1' after the BringToFront.SetForegroundWindow(wanted) call (hopefully this one isn't actually necessary).

add a shell.set_active after you have brought the window to the foreground. For some reason forceActive doesn't call setActive.

NB that setActive does a user32.dll BringWindowToTop call, and needs to be done before you detach thread input.

Note also that it appears if you can do you calls in the right order you may not need to use the thread input hack at all (?)

http://betterlogic.com/roger/?p=2950

(contains several good hints on how to actually do this right)

On Linux, forceActive does work--but only until you move to another few windows,, then it blinks in the taskbar after that (only). Guessing swt bug. [1]

Also related:

How to bring a window to the front?

http://github.com/jarmo/win32screenshot/blob/master/lib/win32/screenshot/bitmap_maker.rb#L110 "set_foreground" which seems to work with both xp and windows 7

[1] Need to bring application to foreground on Windows and https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=303710

This worked for me on Windows 7 and Ubuntu:

private void bringToFront(final Shell shell) {    shell.getDisplay().asyncExec(new Runnable() {        public void run() {            shell.forceActive();        }    });}

This is actually a feature of Windows, which can be enabled via the Tweak UI power toy (at least for Windows XP). When enabled the O/S deliberately prevents a window from forcing itself to be the focused window to stop it "stealing focus". As such, the action to grab focus is changed to just flashing the taskbar icon - since the O/S is deliberately converting the action at the user's request, there will be nothing you can do about it (and this is a good thing).

This was (probably) done because so many applications abused the bring-to-front API and the behavior both annoyed users and caused them to input into the wrong application.