My email reading and surfing habits follow a lazy model: I like to click on a link and load it in the background while I finish absorbing the current context (email, webpage, IRC snippet, etc.). When I'm finished with the current email or webpage, I then go back and check out what I clicked. This was all fine and dandy while I was using the Gnome desktop, but I recently changed to XFCE and some of the defaults are a little different.
The problem: I make use of multiple (virtual) desktops for splitting up my computing activities. I group my active applications together in the 2nd quadrant (think unit-circle quadrants) and my email in the 3rd quadrant. When I click a hyperlink in my email quadrant, XFCE moves my web browser to the 3rd quadrant. This is annoying.
I finally ascertained the appropriate action when I asked on the #xfce channel. The solution is a hidden option
(so called since it is not yet accessible via the GUI) so it's terminal time. The option is activate_action=none and it gets put into ~/.config/xfce4/xfwm4/xfwm4rc.
$ echo activate_action=none >> ~/.config/xfce4/xfwm4/xfwm4rc
After restarting XFCE (otherwise known as logging out and back in), windows no longer switched desktops automatically! Exciting! Thanks #xfce!
I'm still not sure what was wrong with my google-fu, but after the fact, I finally found the documentation of this option in XFCE's svn repository. (Search for activate_action.)
activate_action=bring|switch|noneWhen set tobring, the window manager to bring the window on the current workspace,switchwill switch to the window's workspace, andnonewill simply do nothing but set thedemand attentionflag on the window.
