On unix the fronting of a top-level window like the main IDE window is
the job of the window manager. Yet NB seems to take
it upon itself to behave like MicrosoftWindows whereas a click
anywhere in the main IDE window will front it.

This is very frustrating!
    Not so for people who grew up with Windows and maybe not so for people
    who use click-to-type on unix, but for us focus-follows-mouse people
    it's a PIB ... that's why we stay away from windows.

The IDE takes up a lot of room and sometimes it's useful to
have other applications like terminals not get hidden ,like when I
want to copy paste from IDE <-> xterm.

This is riminiscent of 
    bug #31076
It's not as bad but it's still aggravating.

Please reopen if this problem is not reproducible in SwingSet demo app, thanks.

It works correctly with SwingSet interaction with any widget inside
SwingSet does not front the whole SwingSet demo window.

Thanks for the clarification.
One more question - is the IDE fronting itself when clicking anywhere in it or just some areas are causing this? E.g. editor window, projects window...

(In reply to comment #4)
> Thanks for the clarification.
> One more question - is the IDE fronting itself when clicking anywhere in it or
> just some areas are causing this? E.g. editor window, projects window...

Please provide the info above and reopen, thanks.

Interesting ... I started making a list of what does and what
doesn't make the IDE front and found out that it's not 
very deterministic. The same exact action will or will not
front the IDE.

The main experiment I've been running is having an xterm overlap
a small corner of the ide.
    It's the lower right corner so it's away from the space occupied by
    main menus or the center where popups show up.
I click on the xterm's border to make it come in front of the IDE.
Then I will perform an action in the IDE and then maybe some other actions.

All the following actions sometimes will and sometimes will not
front the IDE and send the xterm behind:
- bringing up a main menu.
- double-clicking in the text area.
- single-clicking a node in an explorer.
- bringing up a fresh editor pane on a file which hasn't been
  opened before?

I get the vague impression that if the action is the first or
one of the first actions performed after moving the focus to
the IDE (note I use focus follows mouse) then the likelihood
of fronting increases. But like I said it's not very deterministic.
That might explain why I got the impression that it "always" happens
as I implied in Comment 1.