Staypaw

About Staypaw

A Windows tray app that puts your keyboard focus back when another app steals it — a chat popup, an installer, a browser an agent is driving — and holds the keys you press meanwhile so the stealer never gets them. Nothing injected, no telemetry.

Windows lets apps pull focus to themselves, and your next keypress lands in the wrong window, sometimes on its default button: Space has cancelled a Visual Studio install, and Esc has killed a Bluetooth transfer. PowerToys #65 has asked for a fix since 2019. Staypaw puts focus straight back where you were typing, and protects one app you pick, a game or your editor, so nothing takes focus from it unless you click or Alt+Tab away, even while you’re idle.

A key you press during a steal never reaches the app that stole focus. Staypaw holds it and sends it to your window once focus is back, or drops it if that window is a game, so nothing is ever replayed into a match. Its tray menu protects the app you were just in, names the app that took focus last and the one that takes it most, and opens a focus log that lists every focus change and what Staypaw did about it.

It watches your keyboard, so it is built to be easy to trust. Nothing is injected: its low-level keyboard hook runs inside Staypaw itself, and it never touches a game’s process. It keeps the time of each keypress, never the key, and writes nothing about keys to disk. The update check is its only network call, and the code that sees your keys can’t reach the network: a test fails if it references the updater or any networking code. It is .NET and Avalonia compiled with NativeAOT, and ships as a signed per-user installer that needs no admin rights and updates itself, plus a portable zip.