You'd need some way to inform the window manager that "windows from this process should be considered modals over this window of mine" - probably something that's in the realm of the possible to hack together?
Why though? Am I the only one that hates modal windows? Why does the parent window have to be blocked by the dialog window? Can't it be like the color picker dialog in GIMP?
Same with your proposed workflow, when you try to close the tab, the file picker will pop up again (within the visible area of the tab, not on another monitor), tab stays opened.
It turns out, that when that happens, the user can accidentally focus the main window while the file picker is up, and then the file picker gets hidden underneath it. As a fun bonus, the application now _probably_ appears to be frozen/crashed because it's waiting for input from the file picker that the user can no longer see.
It's just a bad idea, man. For most people anyway.
Wayland might be more difficult since it likes to isolate processes more but considering this should have been common before Wayland was designed it could and should have influenced that design.
Edit: And I think Wayland would make this impossible? Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but don't you lose basically all inter-window introspection with it? There may be some negotiation process, but I don't know how you would go about accessing an entirely separate application's context under that pipeline.
The freedesktop.org community really needs it's own Raymond Chen pass down all the accumulated arcane knowledge.
The comment links to the documentation, which says it explicitly...
And then, many other places in the documentation, e.g. https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/method.Window.set_modal.html
> Modal windows prevent interaction with other windows in the same application. To keep modal dialogs on top of main application windows, use gtk_window_set_transient_for() to make the dialog transient for the parent; most window managers will then disallow lowering the dialog below the parent.
This oxymoron is a pet peeve of mine. If it's inter-window, then it's just inspection. Introspection is when something inspects itself, but people seem to think it just means inspecting anything technical.
Great post though, I just needed to get that off my chest
I find it particularly ironic or confusing because introspection seems so much less likely/more rarely to occur in anything technical; so why does it get that association? Because you're right, people do seem to use it as though it means 'highly technical inspection' or something.