Top Me Not

Why did the developers at Adobe decide that their update dialog should cover ALL the other windows until it is satisfied? It is, to say the least, a bit of a stumbling block. What if I booted my computer to do something important, like -- use it? What if I have to troubleshoot my Internet connection before the download can start? Here is what that scenario would look like:

Oh, am I in your way? What about now?

Yeah, there's enough screen real estate to just move my window aside. Or I can humbly admit defeat and drag the window to the bottom of the screen until I am done with what I am doing. But the program should bend to my will, not the other way around. For whatever reason, the Adobe developers think they know better than their users which windows should be at the very tippy-top of the Z-order. So, to me, the Adobe update dialog reads a lot like this:

Wait, was that in the EULA?

Since this annoys me so much, I set out to write a program to deal with it. I know there are programs out there, but I don't trust those programs. Plus, I wanted to know how to do this.

After a little bit of searching, I figured out that windows that behave this way do it by rudely and deliberately specifying the HWND_TOPMOST pseudo-handle as the window to be inserted after when calling the SetWindowPos() function. The same documentation that told me about that also described an HWND_NOTOPMOST pseudo-handle for undoing that effect.

I started out by aiming to develop a command-line tool using the same function I used in the screenshot program, namely user32!FindWindow(). This turned out to work nicely: FindWindow() gave me the handle of the window I wanted to target, and SetWindowPos() allowed me to knock it down a rung on the Z-order.

At this point, I almost wrote a note to StackOverflow asking how SysInternals implemented the cool "pick a process" cursor in Process Explorer, but then I decided to try to figure it out myself. I started out with a sample program I'd created based on a pretty decent Windows programming tutorial. I reasoned that the difficulties would be (1) getting mouse input when the cursor is outside of my window, and (2) making the cursor into a crosshairs.

It turned out that the second of these was easiest. I started with the wrong answer first: using SetSystemCursor() to set the normal system-wide cursor (OCR_NORMAL) to the crosshairs until I was finished. Using this along with SetCapture(), I was able to receive and process a WM_LBUTTONUP message even when the mouse was outside my window. But, I discovered that if I didn't save a copy of the regular arrow cursor using CopyCursor() as the documentation said to do, then there was no getting the arrow cursor back. A little bit of RTFM led me to a second prototype wherein you would click down on a window (like in Process Explorer) and release the left mouse button while the cursor is over whatever window you want to shatter at that particular moment. That allowed me to use the more friendly SetCursor() function to change the cursor until the mouse button was released. The result was a tool that I like to call "Top Me Not":

My new boom stick.

As it turned out, the next day, I learned that the popular and useful PEiD analysis tool sometimes likes to take the foreground, too. Well, guess what I did.

Who's on top now? Huh? HUH?

Since then, I've updated the tool to support the /? help argument and provide detailed information on its usage:

Help, at last!

Since you're likely as paranoid as I am, you probably don't want to trust some random hacker to provide you with a binary. Hence, the full source code can be found here:

https://github.com/strictlymike/TopMeNot

Next time a program tries to show you who's boss, go put it in its place.