Seamless mode - all or nothing?

[UnitedWallabies]

Because I find Windows suffocatingly inconvenient, I installed a small FreeBSD VM inside VirtualBox, and am doing most of my work there. The GUI running inside the VM is xfce4, and the VBox seamless mode (entered into with RightCtrl-L) works well.

Except for one thing -- bringing one X11-client to the foreground, brings all X11-clients to the foreground, obscuring the native Windows apps, which is both unexpected and undesired.

For example, if I have:

1. An xterm running in the upper left corner,
2. Another xterm in the lower right corner,
3. Microsoft Outlook in the center,

clicking on the first xterm's titlebar will bring both X11-programs to the foreground, obscuring not only the upper-left portion of Outlook, but also the bottom-right segment...

I guess, that's because -- to Windows -- the VM is one application, and it brings all of it to the foreground...

Is there a way to change this somehow?

[scottgus1]

I also get the all-or-nothing result as you get. Windows 10 host, Windows XP guest. Click one guest window, they all come up.

I believe this is because the guest remains a completely separate system. Seamless is really a full-screen but transparent guest desktop, and Virtualbox registers any click on the guest desktop that doesn't fall on a guest window object as a click to pass to the host underneath. It's the whole desktop apparently, it doesn't work just by individual windows.

I believe there is no way to change this behavior without reprogramming Virtualbox.

[UnitedWallabies]

I believe there is no way to change this behavior without reprogramming Virtualbox.

Ok, thanks. I filed a ticket (19741) to get the ball rolling...

[scottgus1]

Keep in mind that development on Virtualbox is driven by paying Oracle customers. The only ways this would happen is if the paying customers want it too, or if the code was contribute by a user.