@efiring The point of this issue was not that windows should automatically be brought to the front--just that matplotlib should expose an API for doing so. That way if the GUI window pops up under my terminal I can just type a quick command to bring it forward. Or, more importantly, for applications that use matplotlib it would be nice to be able to do this.

I would say then that it's the responsibility of an application using matplotlib to provide users with an option to not allow windows to steal focus. All matplotlib needs to do is provide the appropriate API. I think this should still be done, but it turns out to be surprisingly tricky to get consistent across platforms. OSX should be fairly straightfoward, but X11 is tough. As @dmcdougall wrote all the relevant GUI toolkits have a way of doing this, but the actual resulting behavior is up to the whims of the window manager.

What we can do for X11 is bypass the window manager altogether and communicate with the X server via EWMH protocol--a standard protocol for window managers supported by most window managers still in common use. If we use EWMH it should be possible to do this without confusing the active window manager, so long as it's EWMH-compliant. Otherwise fall back on doing the best the GUI toolkit can provide and not guarantee the results. I could give that a try, but it would be up to others to provide the OSX and Windows implementations.

Uh oh!

Add "bring window to front" functionality #596

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