Haven't you talked about moving the ICS communication from the console
to a window? If so this problem will disappear.
Indeed we have, and there is even a patch around in some side branch
that does this in the Xt version. That was much more convenient, because
it allowed us to give it focus, reposition and resize the window from
the XBoard code, define context menus when you click on ICS output...
All those niceties that WinBoard gives you, and XBoard not, but that I
didn't know how to do when the ICS interaction window was a separate
xterm window.
But what stopped us there was that the Athena widget set did not seem to
allow selective colorization of text in ascii widgets, like we have in
the xterm. Perhaps GTK does allow this, so we could re-instate that
patch. And then of course we still have to do a lot more to bring it at
the level of WinBoard.