Any way to stop the engine from stealing focus?

Development Getting Started & Setup
1

The editor has the maddening fondness for forcing itself to have application focus. Given that I’m frequently telling the editor to do something and then switching away to another program for a few seconds, this is maddening. It completely disrupts my workflow. It can also be dangerous: for example, if I’m typing a message on Discord, and need to delete a few characters, I can end up accidentally deleting objects in my level instead.

For example, here are some times that the editor forces itself to focus:

  • When it starts launching (after I tell my IDE to compile and run)
  • When it finishes launching and displays the main editor window
  • When it finishes restoring other window state after launching
  • When it finishes live coding recompiling

I would like the editor to stay in the background unless I explicitly switch to it. Is there some .ini setting or option I can set somewhere to achieve this?

Thank you!

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2

i have the same issue on Linux, but i disabled focus stealing on KDE. it’s not a great solution though. and dont think you can do that on windows.

3

Yeah, I would dearly love to be able to stop focus-stealing at the OS level, but so far as I’m aware, it’s not possible on Windows. I have never seen a program so eager to do it as Unreal Engine is, though.

1 Like