Applications temporarily lose focus on layout change

A child of bug 1218322 (aka keyboard layout switch being a complete disaster since 13.10).

When switching layout using a hotkey (e.g. Alt+Shift), the currently active application loses focus for a short period. Depending on the application, it causes all sorts of misbehavior, including:

- In Gedit, press Ctrl+F to search for something, and change the layout in the middle of typing the word you're searching for. The search dialog closes and subsequent letters are inserted into the text file.

- In Libreoffice, press Ctrl+F to search for something, and change the layout in the middle of typing the word you're searching for. The previously entered word gets selected, hence the next keypress erases it.

- In Firefox, begin composing a Gmail message. Highlight a part of the text with the intent that the next keypress will erase it and replace with the key pressed. Switch layout before pressing the desired letter. Notice that the highlighed part is lost.

- In Firefox, inside Facebook's list of active chat users, begin searching for a username. Change the layout. The entered text (partial name of a friend) is lost.

- In any GTK app, try entering a Unicode character by Ctrl+Shift+U followed by the number. While entering the number, change the layout. (E.g. I switch between Hungarian and English, where Hungarian unexpectedly produces "ö" where my intent is "0"). The partial Unicode hex code is lost, I have to start again by Ctrl+Shift+U followed by the hex code.

I'm sure there are plenty of similar issues.

Changing the keyboard layout should be transparent to applications and should not break the flow of typing characters under any circumstance.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: gnome-settings-daemon 3.8.5-0ubuntu11.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-18.32-generic 3.11.10.4
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-18-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2.2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Mar 7 18:19:27 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-05-30 (645 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120425)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: gnome-settings-daemon
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-10-12 (145 days ago)