$.focus() not working

Question

Actually the example you gave for focusing on this site works just fine, as long as you're not focused in the console. The reason that's not working is simply because it's not stealing focus from the dev console. If you run the following code in your console and then quickly click in your browser window after, you will see it focus the search box:

setTimeout(function() { $('input[name="q"]').focus() }, 3000);

As for your other one, the one thing that has given me trouble in the past is order of events. You cannot call focus() on an element that hasn't been attached to the DOM. Has the element you are trying to focus already been attached to the DOM?

Found a solution elsewhere on the net...

$('#id').focus();

did not work.

$('#id').get(0).focus();

did work.

Some of the answers here suggest using setTimeout to delay the process of focusing on the target element. One of them mentions that the target is inside a modal dialog. I cannot comment further on the correctness of the setTimeoutsolution without knowing the specific details of where it was used. However, I thought I should provide an answer here to help out people who run into this thread just as I did

The simple fact of the matter is that you cannot focus on an element which is not yet visible. If you run into this problem ensure that the target is actually visible when the attempt to focus it is made. In my own case I was doing something along these lines

$('#elementid').animate({left:0,duration:'slow'});
$('#elementid').focus();

This did not work. I only realized what was going on when I executed $('#elementid').focus()` from the console which did work. The difference - in my code above the target there is no certainty that the target will infact be visible since the animation may not be complete. And there lies the clue

$('#elementid').animate({left:0,duration:'slow',complete:focusFunction});

function focusFunction(){$('#elementid').focus();}

works just as expected. I too had initially put in a setTimeout solution and it worked too. However, an arbitrarily chosen timeout is bound to break the solution sooner or later depending on how slowly the host device goes about the process of ensuring that the target element is visible.

if you use bootstrap + modal, this worked for me :

  $(myModal).modal('toggle');
  $(myModal).on('shown.bs.modal', function() {
    $('#modalSearchBox').focus()
  });

Just in case anybody else stumbles across this question and had the same situation I had - I was trying to set the focus after clicking on another element, yet the focus didn't appear to work. It turns out I just needed an e.preventDefault(); - here's an example:

$('#recipients ul li').mousedown(function(e) {
    // add recipient to list
    ...
    // focus back onto the input
    $('#message_recipient_input').focus();
    // prevent the focus from leaving
    e.preventDefault();
});

This helped:

If you call HTMLElement.focus() from a mousedown event handler, you must call event.preventDefault() to keep the focus from leaving the HTMLElement. Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/focus

I also had this problem. The solution that worked in my case was using the tabindex property on the HTML element.

I was using ng-repeat for some li elements inside a list and I was not able to bring focus to the first li using .focus(), so I simply added the tabindex attribute to each li during the loop.

so now <li ng-repeat="user in users track by $index" tabindex="{{$index+1}}"></li>

That +1 was index starts from 0. Also make sure that the element is present in DOM before calling the .focus() function

I hope this helps.