[…] "Background" means 2 things: don't block the shell […]

Yes, I could use ps to check if geany is running and if not, call geany filename & […]

Why can't you do just that in all cases? I see no reason why it wouldn't work if Geany is already running too. At worse, use nohup if you need.
Going in the background, as in detaching from the parent process is annoying. It's not strictly speaking hard, but it requires some special work, and fork() has some annoying properties -- maybe we wouldn't care at this point, not sure.
Also, I fail to see the real use case here, until I see & at the shell level doesn't work for soem (bad) reasons. So for this part, I'd rather say "no".

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When the script finishes, it will call geany without the --background option and the final report as filename, then geany will pop up to notify me about the end f the script.

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BTW: sending the reports per mail is not an optoin, because I want to keep the files in the end. Having them via mail would require additional steps (save them, open them for editing).

Hum, couldn't you simply save the files in a log directory, and open them manually/at the end?

I'm not strictly speaking against an option disabling window presentation/tab switching (although that later one might require a special handling), but I kinda fail to see the point, and the use case seem very specific and unusual. But well, I guess we'd accept a nice implementation of this part, esp. if we get convinced it's indeed really necessary for some legitimate used cases.

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