A typical workday starts like this: I open up my notebook, type in my password, fire up Eclipse using QuickSilver (⌘-space, ec⏎), fire up Tweetbot using QuickSilver (⌘-space, tw⏎), start Adium (⌘-space, ad⏎), start Mail (⌘-space, m⏎), start Safari (⌘-space, s⏎).

Any time when I try to start one such application Eclipse can swoop in with its “Select workspace” dialog, causing me to create workspaces with names “ec”, “ad”, “mail”, etc. This is because I try to get my day started quickly, and Eclipse is an asocial attention seeker stealing the input from other applications.

So one day I was fed up with the umptieth unfortunate workspace creation event and I looked up if someone had encountered this problem and thought about fixing it.

There’s a fix for this (full article): add the following two (2!) lines of XML to Eclipse’s plist file in the dist section:

<key>LSBackgroundOnly</key>
<string>True</string>

This will prevent the application from stealing the focus when you are busy with other things. You can modify this yourself while waiting for the Eclipse guys to solve this issue.