This is a more complex problem and I have initially posted it on the Openbox tracker: https://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6017 Some applications (commonly native linux games) are grabbing the keyboard (I'm assuming they are calling XGrabKeyboard()). They keybinds from any window manager won't work in this case anymore. But this also prevents important features such as minimizing the application or making screenshots. But as you can see on the linked ticket I'm not sure if this problem should be solved by all windows manager or xorg. If all windows manager would call XGrabKeyboard() at the beginning no application could make any keybindings anymore. Currently this would break some applications like many native linux games and GTK+ menus. If this is a problem that should be solved by xorg I'm seeing 2 potential ways to solve this: 1. XGrabKey() could prevent any further grabbing to the mapped keys. A call of XGrabKeyboard() will then grab all keys except already grabbed ones. 2. XGrabKey() and XGrabKeyboard() could create a stack and report events to every application that has made a grab.
I have thought about it and in some cases it might be actually important that applications can uniquely grab the keyboard. For example if a screenlocker couldn't and in the background a chat window would still be open as soon as the user enters his password on the locking window this might be a security problem. I'm not sure how to solve this at all but eventually aggressive abilities like uniquely grabbing the keyboard should be bind to higher permissions so that it can be configured which applications are allowed to do this.
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