With the tiling WM Xmonad (regardless of Lucid/GTK2/GTK3/PGTK toolkit), in which new Emacs frames always receive focus by default: 0. emacs -Q 1. M-: (setq pop-up-frames 'graphic-only) RET 2. M-x TAB This pops up and gives focus to a new frame with the *Completions* buffer: