Here's a patch against xfwm-4.0.4 that switch workspace as required when a window is supposed to be shown. I'm not sure this is the best way (first time hacking xfce sources), but my guess is that it was overlooked. Very useful with emacsclient :)
sorry, this goes against #115 - I agree this should be the default behaviour, unfortunately, it seems other DE took another path. Olivier.
I have first encountered this behaviour using latest kde versions, and i'm pretty sure they follow freedesktop.org's recommendations. Quoting the current WM spec draft: "Activation In the X world, activating a window means to give it the input focus. This may not be possible if the window is unmapped, because it is on a different desktop. Thus, activating a window may involve additional steps like moving it to the current desktop (or changing to the desktop the window is on), deiconifying it or raising it." So the behavior is unspecified, and this is unrelated to actually starting applications, where i also find that opening them on the current desktop is the most natural thing to do (only startup applications need to be opened on specific desktops usually). If my patch effectively does what's described in #115, then I'll be happy to know if it's possible to implement 'activation' without this 'remember where i live' problem in xfce.
Olivier, What's your opinion on this subject now? Raising a window on an unmapped display should at least get some attention...
AFAIK, this is fixed in the current version of Xfce (4.4.x) If this isn't fixed, feel free to reopen this bug. -H-