This is especially important now that --no-grab is the default behavior of GnuPG Agent.

Could you expand on this slightly?

Recently this transience has deteriorated further still - it's now not even working for the usual PIN prompts - i.e. i3 doesn't float them any more.

I presume this is because of the gpg-agent change that you describe, since there hasn't been a pinentry release since T3253. Is there a gpg-agent setting I can change in the mean time, to get back to the old 'grab' behaviour?

Could you expand on this slightly?

Let me summarize:

With the current released version (1.0.0), pinentry-gtk-2 has the following behavior under tiling window managers:

a) If pinentry grabs the keyboard, PIN request dialogs float as expected, but simple message dialogs (such as those telling the user to insert a card) do not;
b) If pinentry is told not to grab the keyboard, all dialogs do not float.

My previous patch fixed a), but I had missed b). And this was problematic because starting from GnuPG 2.1.23, the agent does tell pinentry not to grab the keyboard anymore.

Is there a gpg-agent setting I can change in the mean time, to get back to the old 'grab' behaviour?

Yes. Use the --grab option (just put grab on a single line in $GNUPGHOME/gpg-agent.conf).

In rP2b1fb2f30a94a967dacec298e3c7d8a80b4c3194#48919, @gouttegd wrote:

Could you expand on this slightly?

Let me summarize:
[...]
(just put grab on a single line in $GNUPGHOME/gpg-agent.conf).

Thank you! I think grabbing might be my preferred behaviour anyway, so I might not change this back even when this commit makes it to a release.