It's 2015 and I can't "alt-tab" into spotify in order to pause/play by pressing space; I have to click somewhere in the upper half of the interface in order to "refocus", or the spacebar just scrolls down. Which is useful for something, I guess.
Though this is on Ubuntu, and Spotify is still a beta app on that platform last I checked. I don't think I've had this problem on Windows.
Check out the Arch Linux wiki on this. Spotify apparently plays nicely with the rest of your desktop and you should be able to set up media key short cuts.
I made a script that plays/pauses Spotify through dbus, which I usually execute by opening dmenu. :)
My keyboard has media keys, but I thought I would prefer short textual commands to having to move my hand to the upper right of my keyboard (and probably miss the key if I wasn't looking?).
Yeah media keys are annoying and not present on lots of keyboards. You could map this script via your window manager to something like special-F5 through to special-F8 to back-play/pause-stop-forward...
In Ubuntu Unity, you can just click on the sound icon in the top right corner of the screen and click pause. Or you can use the pause button on your keyboard, if you have one.
Though this is on Ubuntu, and Spotify is still a beta app on that platform last I checked. I don't think I've had this problem on Windows.