Focus issues with Stage Manager on iPad

[deviantintegral]

I often have Blink sharing a space with Safari and other apps. I often notice the following:

1. I'm on some other unrelated space.
2. I press CMD-Tab from the keyboard to switch to an app that is in the same space as Blink. That other app is in the foreground.
3. My keyboard input is directed to Blink, and not the top-most app.
4. And then if I press something like CMD-W, the Blink window is closed by mistake and I lose my connection (and sometimes work!).

Anyone have any workarounds for this? My guess is this is an iPadOS issue, but I think I've only ever seen this when Blink is open.

[carloscabanero]

This is really rare, but I have experienced it myself multiple times. I'm afraid it falls into the iPadOS category, and unfortunately it is one of those bugs that I'm unsure if it will ever be fixed on the platform 😔. The state of things is not ideal, and makes you consider how Apple sees the future of the platform. The more you use StageManager the more you find these kind of issues, for example, at one point the input will stop working altogether (I suspect it is stuck somewhere), or keys may get stuck, or spotlight may receive input but not the apps, or the software keyboard will pop up and never disappear, or you need to explicitly trigger the input in an app so it actually gets the focus, or you may have "app or window switcher" in the iPad and the screen will have a regular app but won't be receiving input until you resolve the app selection, etc... I think a big part of the issue is that the platform has grown in complexity exponentially and the states the iOS and iPadOS apps have are way more than even previously on the desktop. I personally think this is not a good place to be for a new platform that should focus on doing things differently.

I do have a few tips though, from what we all have learnt through the years:

• Focus errors are rare, and in their basic manifestation, usually if you know apps are in a weird state, giving the focus to an input box in another app fixes the problem. For example, between Blink and Safari, select the address bar in Safari. Or viceversa, tap on Blink (the terminal is a giant text box).
• Another way to avoid this is to use different screens as they are handled by different SM states. But not ideal as sometimes you just want to do side by side.
• To avoid bad things from happening, use a different shortcut on Blink for Cmd-W. Ie, Cmd-Shift-W.
• Also, maybe use multiplexer like tmux or screen so the remote session is also not lost in the server and you can just recover. That's my preferred option.

Hope this helps!

PS: There was a time when Blink had to do special things with the focus in order to keep it between tabs, or to smooth the experience with older multitask implementations, but fortunately, this is not the case anymore. Blink is just another app and most issues just happen from internal OS states going rogue, and an app that you are keeping open a really long time. That's why it is usually Blink+Safari.

[deviantintegral]

Thanks for all these details. It doesn't surprise me that these are iPadOS bugs. A multiplexer is great, except for those times you don't expect to be connected long and don't bother to run it!

I had no idea I could customize CMD-W - I assumed that was entirely managed by the OS. I'll give that a try!