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When I set a window as a child of another using SetParent how can I prevent a loss of focus of the parent window (the title bar greying out) when I select the child inside?

Is there some way to group all of these windows into a single focus?

That's the default behaviour for child windows & their parent.

You most likely need to set +WS_CHILD -WS_POPUP for the child window. For instance:If you uncomment the Gui, 2:+0x4... line, GUI 2 is set as the foreground window whenever you try to focus GUI 1. Pressing Alt+F4 closes GUI 2 (or does nothing if it's already closed), and pressing GUI 1's close button doesn't work.

After adding WS_CHILD and removing WS_POPUP, AHK Window Info shows that GUI 1 is the foreground/active window, and GUI 2 is the focused control.

Thank you! I've been trying to get this to work forever.

Thanks for this useful info.

With this I can actually embed one program into another seamlessly by parenting it to a child window or an MDI window and setting these flags to prevent loss of focus from the main application.

It just occurred to me that since the hWndParent parameter of CreateWindowEx (the function used to create a window) is either the parent window or owner window (depending on whether you specify the WS_CHILD style), we don't even need SetParent when dealing with our own GUIs: