New Window Changes Desktop Assignment of Other Windows

#1

I’m mentioning this as a first pass before filing a bug report / feature request in case this is expected or known behavior. I often have several Atom windows open at a time in different projects – I use it quite a bit – and I recently upgraded from Atom 1.7 to Atom 1.15. In the newer version of Atom, the creation of a new window seems to call an existing window onto my current desktop; the old version did not do this.

To clarify: I open an Atom window on Desktop 4 (using "atom ") to work on Project A. Later, on Desktop 2, I open another Atom window (again using "atom " from the command line) to work on Project B. When I do this, the Project A window is moved to Desktop 2; then a new Project B window opens, also on Desktop 2. I’d prefer that the existing windows I have open not move around just because I’m opening other windows.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? Is there a configuration setting I can tweak to prevent this from happening? I open and close Atom windows a lot and it’s been interfering with my workflow a bit.

Thank you!

#2

Hmmm, I can’t reproduce the behavior you described:

To clarify: I open an Atom window on Desktop 4 (using "atom ") to work on Project A. Later, on Desktop 2, I open another Atom window (again using "atom " from the command line) to work on Project B. When I do this, the Project A window is moved to Desktop 2; then a new Project B window opens, also on Desktop 2. I’d prefer that the existing windows I have open not move around just because I’m opening other windows.

This is what I tried (I have 2 desktops on OS X 10.12.3):

  1. In Desktop 1, start a Terminal window and start Atom: $ atom
  2. In Desktop 2, start another Terminal window. At this point, I have to go back to Desktop 1 since using Spotlight to run Terminal will just send me back to the Terminal window in Desktop 1. I then start a new Terminal window and move it to Desktop 2.
  3. In Desktop 2, start Atom $ atom.

At this point, I’m sent back to Desktop 1 and a new Atom window opens. So the behavior I’m seeing is the opposite - instead of Project A getting moved to Desktop 2, Project B is moved to Desktop 1. Can you confirm if my steps don’t match what you were doing?

Also for a bit more clarification, can you confirm what operating system and version you’re running? I assumed macOS.

#5

The last two posts were errant. I just discovered numerous processes on my machine with the following sort of command line:

/usr/share/atom/atom --type=renderer --no-sandbox --primordial-pipe-token=2A0B6CEA29809BD6CDEF28A5DD6B6FCD --lang=en-US --node-integration=true --background-color=#fff --hidden-page --enable-pinch --num-raster-threads=4 --content-image-texture-target=3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553 --video-image-texture-target=3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553,3553 --disable-accelerated-video-decode --mojo-channel-token=C35062684ACE4A1C1B3C58A6B6542648 --mojo-application-channel-token=127A70F5971F96F48E032EE49C33CCC9 --channel=30897.4.413969793 --v8-natives-passed-by-fd --v8-snapshot-passed-by-fd

When I killed all of them, Atom resumed its previous 1.15.0 behavior. In other words, I’m back to my original problem.

@rsese: I can confirm I’m seeing different behavior that what you are seeing. From what I can tell, the most recently created Atom window (not the most recently focused one) is called to my current desktop whenever I open a new Atom window. My desktop does not change; the window moves to me rather than me moving to it. That said, there may be a common cause to both of these behaviors if there’s something behind the scenes that, in sending an existing Atom window a message saying “open a new window”, somehow causes the environment to think that the window should be focused or presented.

I’ll file a bug report about this in a little while, but I’m hoping to get an idea of others’ experiences first so I can provide as much info to the developers as possible.

#6

I can confirm I’m seeing different behavior that what you are seeing.

Interesting, not sure if that because you’re on a different operating system (I think one of your withdrawn posts mentioned you’re on *nix?) - I did a bit more poking around in case this was more of an Electron issue and I did come across this issue:

This seems to be related to the behavior you’re describing? The issue author is on Ubuntu.

#7

Yes, I’m on a *nix. I’m running Debian Jessie (testing) with XFCE4.

I don’t think this is the issue I’m having. The author describes the newly-opened file popping up in the first window and I don’t see that behavior. When I try to open the second atom window from the command line, I do get a second window and the files open there; this is expected and good. However, Atom additionally moves the most recently opened window from wherever it is to my current desktop. (I think the act of opening the second window causes that Atom window to gain focus for just a moment, which causes XFCE4 to change its desktop assignment.) This latter behavior is undesired.

The poster mentions that a workaround is to use “–new-window”. That doesn’t change the behavior for me: the other window is still called to my current desktop.

This used to work just fine on Atom 1.7. I’m not sure what changed about the process that has caused the act of opening another project to focus an existing window, but that seems to be the result.