Disable window focus follows mouse without click

I've noticed that I can scroll a window without clicking on it by moving the mouse cursor over that window. For example, this Safari window has focus, and I'm typing in it, but if I move the cursor to another application (Terminal or another application), I can scroll that other window without having to click on it. This gets me into trouble, because I can scroll around the other window then start typing, thinking that I'm in that other window because I'm actively doing something to it (scrolling), but the text goes to the window which really has the focus. For example, Mail has focus, then I scroll around a Terminal looking for something, and I type the delete key forgetting that I'm in Mail. This has an advantage in that one can scroll a window that is not on top, but there are drawbacks.
Is there a way to require the click in a window in order to scroll in that window?
Thanks,
==Leonard

Cool! Thanks for Window Wrangler! That's a pretty neat program. Not what I was looking for exactly, but it'll do just fine.
I now see what you were trying to show me with the zoom. That's not what I'm looking for.
What I'm looking for is focus follows mouse. What it does is as you put a mouse over a window, that window gets focus. But does not raise to the top.
So say I have a web browser open, and my IM client open. I'll leave the client at the bottom of the screen and have the browser sized up just enough to see the text field and the first two lines of conversation of the chat.
Now, on my linux system to reply all I have to do is put the curser over the IM window and I can type into it without having to click on it and bring it to the top.
For that example, it isn't a huge deal. But when you have 5 or 6 windows open all organized with each on the right level, bringing one to the top will screw it up.
I'm liable to have a few terminal windows, IM, email, IM, some programming ide, etc open at once. It's especially useful for web development. I can have the source file open and edit it, but not bring it over the browser window so I can have an idea of what I'm doing with the source.

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Xmonad and focus follows mouse issue

I've been fiddling around with xmonad, and I notice that with focus follows mouse turned on, when I create a new window the window under the mouse gets selected instead of the window that I have just created. Pretty irritating, Anyone know how to solve that?
Thanks for any help provided,
Kruppe

Yes, disabling the focus follows mouse behaviour makes it so the correct window is always chosen.
I kind of like having focus follows mouse for when I need to copy and paste in applications that don't provide good methods for doing that purely with the keyboard (firefox and most terminals when not using screen). I would therefore like to have focus follows mouse.
Sidenote: What is this updatePointer thing you use and what does it do?

Focus follows mouse, etc

So many years ago I was a mac user. And many years ago this forum looked different...
But I have since switched to linux. Which I like because I can program it however I want.
BUT now I have a mac again. My macbook with intel ran linux, but it died. So now I have a powerbook. Since PPC linux ***** I'm running 10.5 on it.
I actually really like this system. It's pretty straight forward and easy to use, just a few things I want for it that I can't find.
One big major thing that's really holding me back with the system is there's no focus follows mouse. Especially with the small screen it's something I really need to use the computer. And no auto-raise please. That completely ruins the point of focus follows mouse.
I do have it working in terminal via playing with some plist files. And that's mostly where I use it. But I use it enough on the rest of the system that it's something I really want.
Also, I'd really like to be able to hold down a modifier key, and click anywhere in a window to be able to move it. Something else I've become really accgstomed to in my GUI that I'd like to have on this little machine.
Thanks for any help.

Cool! Thanks for Window Wrangler! That's a pretty neat program. Not what I was looking for exactly, but it'll do just fine.
I now see what you were trying to show me with the zoom. That's not what I'm looking for.
What I'm looking for is focus follows mouse. What it does is as you put a mouse over a window, that window gets focus. But does not raise to the top.
So say I have a web browser open, and my IM client open. I'll leave the client at the bottom of the screen and have the browser sized up just enough to see the text field and the first two lines of conversation of the chat.
Now, on my linux system to reply all I have to do is put the curser over the IM window and I can type into it without having to click on it and bring it to the top.
For that example, it isn't a huge deal. But when you have 5 or 6 windows open all organized with each on the right level, bringing one to the top will screw it up.
I'm liable to have a few terminal windows, IM, email, IM, some programming ide, etc open at once. It's especially useful for web development. I can have the source file open and edit it, but not bring it over the browser window so I can have an idea of what I'm doing with the source.

Ugh! Please restore old Terminal.app focus-follows-mouse behavior!

The 10.4 and prior Terminal.app's focus-follows-mouse feature allowed one to type into the terminal by mousing over it even if the Terminal wasn't the currently focussed application. It didn't focus Terminal when you did this, but did direct keyboard input to it.
10.5's Terminal.app only allows focus follows mouse to work when it's the focussed application, which destroys about 80% of this feature's usability for me. I like to keep things like finder and browser windows overlapping most of a terminal window and then just slide the mouse over to the terminal to type there, and I can no longer do that in 10.5. Now I have to click on the Terminal window, bringing all my terminal windows forward and obscuring the windows I wanted on top. Very annoying.
Is there any way to restore the old behaviour? If not, can we please have it back?
Luckily, 10.4's Terminal.app still behaves properly in 10.5, so I'm using it, but I'd like to have some of the new features of 10.5's Terminal.app. Unfortunately, "broken" focus-follows-mouse is a deal-breaker for me.

The command I know,
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string Yes
seems to work about the same in Leopard as in Tiger for me. I don't remember ever being able to get focus-follows-mouse behaviour to work in a non-active application from an active non-focus-follows-mouse application. In other words one can focus follows mouse from one Terminal to another, but not from Finder to Terminal.
The X11 equivalent (why the inconsistent key and value?) is
defaults write com.apple.X11 wm_ffm -bool true
I remember being able to focus-follows-mouse between Terminal and X11, but cannot in Leopard. However, I also cannot in Tiger 10.4.11 either, so maybe it is my memory that is faulty.
What I don't seem to be able to do, but could do in Tiger, is
defaults write com.apple.X11 swapaltmeta -int 1
On Tiger, that would make the option key the meta key, so that e.g. alt-d would delete forward one word, etc. On Leopard, this seems to be a NOP which means that cmd is the only possible meta key, which I personally find rather confusing.

Focus follows mouse

Hi,
Is there a way to keep a window open while another window is selected? What I would like to is manually type in a window while another window is visible. Other than clicking on alternate windows or resizing the windows I know of no way to do this.
It seems to me that I had a utility that had focus follows mouse as one of the options. This stopped working a couple of releases ago and I have forgotten its name.
Thanks.

I can't appreciate the small space since I don't have a laptop, but you should be able to squeeze in two, either side by side or one on top of the other. Increase the display resolution, maybe? Other than that, I feel thy pain.

Focus Follows Mouse In Aqua (No, I don't mean X11)

Hello mass of Apple users!
I have been switching back in forth between my Windows XP install and OS 10.4.11 and realized how much I miss focus follows mouse.
Does any one know how to enable it? From what I've found it doesn't seem
to be possible, except with the Terminal application, which can be enabled with by using defaults.

MondoMouse - VersionTracker or MacUpdate.

Follow mouse without going out of the flash document

hello everybody!! I have a movieclip (a line) that follows my
poiner horizontally but i have some problems when my pointer gets
_x = 0 because my movieclip gets (half of it) out of the document.
Is there any way to control the movieclip to not to get out of the
flash document? I hope i have explained it well. xD
PS: Sorry for my english

Investigate the optional arguments for mc.startDrag(). I seem
to recall there being some that limit the area a movie clip can be
dragged in. If you limit your clip's movement to only the areas
where it is completely visible, that should solve the
problem.

KDE Window Focus Problem

In KDE, when I'm focused on a window in foreground and I click on the contents of a window in the background the focus of the window changes, but the window that was in the foreground does not go behind the window that I just clicked on.
http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/2745 … cusli7.png
In that picture, I was focused on the Pidgin window and I clicked on this text box of Firefox and the Pidgin window in the foreground.
The only way to place that window in the background is to click the title bar on top of Firefox, then it behaves normally. By the way, I'm running KDE3.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
Last edited by darkNiGHTS (2008-03-26 02:19:46)

It's been quite some time since I've used KDE, but isn't there some kind of "raise on focus" setting that would raise newly focused windows? I'm certain this setting exists for focus-follows-mouse but I don't remember if it applies to click-to-focus.
j

IPhoto text field input focus requires mouse hover

This is driving me crazy. To add text to a photo title or description, the mouse must not just click in the text box -- it must stay there! If the mouse drifts away after the click or you bump the mouse while typing, text input stops. This is seems peculiar and turns out to be quite frustrating. This reminds me of the old days when there was a debate over window focus and mouse movement.
Once you click into a text field, that field should stay active until you do something intentional to leave it (tab, enter, click, etc.).

I'm having the same problem as you with dealing with text. After some hours of trying all kinds of clicking around and holding down extra keys (the arrow keys help a bit), I'm getting nowhere. I was automatically upgraded to 9.1.1 when I got my new MacBookPro. I was previously on an older version of iPhoto. The description pane in the older version was bigger and much simpler to use (there is spare space on the iPhoto 9.1.1 screen layout, so why did Apple make its description panel so small?). Version 9.1.1 has more editing options, but I haven't yet found a way of using most of them because as you say, it's so difficult to keep selected text active for editing.
I have also tried drafting my descriptions inside Word first and then pasting them into iPhoto. They paste OK but the pasted text is black (as in Word) - but against the near-black of the iPhoto description pane, it's almost invisible! I thought I could then change the pasted text colour in iPhoto to white (on black) by using 'colours' from inside the description-editing options of iPhoto, but for the above reasons, I can't find any way of doing that.
There seems to be no direct help for these problems in iPhoto Help. Has anyone out there worked out what the select-and-edit routines should be? If not, I just hope Apple will solve these things in the next upgrade, or at the very least give us a bigger text pane.
Message was edited by: digidaze

Firefox Loses Window Focus, Mouse Button profiles change to default

I have a G700 mouse, which supports various hotkey profiles. For default profile, i have most buttons disabled. For games, i have game-specific hotkeys, and for firefox, i have firefox specific hotkeys (new tab, close tab, etc).
There are 2 times that I notice this behavior:
1) During regular browsing, clicking on various links causes firefox to lose focus, and the mouse software reverts from the "firefox" profile to the "default" profile. Interacting with firefox in any way does not fix this problem. the only way for firefox to become the default profile again is to click a different window or on the desktop, and then click back into firefox. The profile seems to be lost right after clicking a (javascript) link, though the number of links clicked is arbitrary. I cannot reproduce this issue with any fixed results (number of click, time period before losing focus, etc). But I can reproduce this issue reliably.
When the mouse buttons stop working, the keyboard hotkey shortcuts DONT stop working. I dont have to re-select the firefox window to use keyboard shortcuts, I only have to do that if i want to use the mouse shortcut.
2) If I am in private browsing mode, clicking links (specifically for websites that contain flash) causes the window which contains flash to move into the background and the non-private window becomes the foreground. Again, the mouse loses focus and the only way to regain focus is to manually click the window or to click away on a non-firefox object, then click the window. I believe this is a flashplayer based issue, though, and is unrelated to the profiles issue. When this happens, any interaction with a flash video also forces firefox's KEYBOARD hotkeys to not work. Ctrl+w and ctrl+t dont do anything, hitting escape does not give firefox control over keyboard hotkeys, and hitting "tab" only selects elements within the flash object. For youtube, it cycles through various clickable controls.
EDIT: I have tried resetting the firefox profile and using a completely new profile, and i have also tried syncing profiles. This is a persistent problem.

I'm using Firefox 23. This has been a problem since I got my mouse in September ish of 2012. As I stated, I've worked with logitech on this issue, they have no idea why it happens because only firefox exhibits this behavior. No other app on my computer does this and Firefox reset and clean profile do not do anything to solve the problem. Using logitech logging, I can produce a log and output of whenever the profile switches. I might be able to use logitech scripting to output debug information about what exactly causes it but that would take dev time I don't have.

W/zoteroinstalledwedo a window,open() followed by a window.close() in tha window. Zotero remains and the window is still open. How do I close the window with zotero present in FF w/o disabling zotero?

the js function to window.open() is in pageAA on a tab.
We click the form or link to open the popup to run a video.
We have a close button on the popup window.
When that is clicked the window.close() js is executed on that page leaving Zotero present and the popup still open.
We've tried using close() window.close() name.window.close() and
all fail the same way.
Short of disabling Zotero is there a way to close the popup in FF and any other addons with one shot?

Thank's but still no fix.
In safe mode everything works.
Without Zotero - everything works.
When the popup is loaded with Zotero, the tab shows a constant "Loading" with the circular in process icon.
The Zotero icon shows to the left of the tab.
If I right click on Zotero and close it, the close() js works properly
Is there a way to do a window.open() with:
A. no tabs -or-
B. block all add on's -or-
C. to kill an add on
before doing the close()?

Super irritating windows problem - how to right click without drivers!!??

i'm trying to help a friend install x64 windows 7 on her "new" macbook. i say "new" bc here in argentina they are a bit behind on the latest models. we have a late 2009 macbook.
she bought this computer before and i successfully installed windows 7 x64 on it, but she changed back to a pc, then BACK to a macbook. same model.
for some reason, the install of windows was flawless this time, despite using the same windows disc and the same model macbook.
ANYWAY, i'm at the point where i put in the install dvd to install the windows drivers, and i get the message "x64 not supported on this machine"....
i've found a workaround online, where i can go into the bootcamp64.msi file, etc...
but how the h.e.l.l. do you right click without the bootcamp drivers installed????
this is windows 7, which is a piece of krap, but it's what she bought....
this is super annoying. anyone have any ideas?
i need to right click so i can install the drivers so that the trackpad can do what right click is supposed to do.
thanks...

hey, thanks for responding....
that didn't work, because i'm on a trackpad that doesn't have the bootcamp drivers installed, but in order to install the drivers in windows 7, it requires a right click to access the drop down menu to "troubleshoot compatibility" of the bootcamp x64 driver...
but after some digging around, i found that the work-around for right-click WITHOUT drivers is the following:
shift-f10 (click)
again, thanks for responding. i love apple forums, usually people willing to help others, especially when it comes to lame windows compatibility.
hopefully someone who encounters this same b.s. will find this post.
take care!

Lasso tool problem, using alt key, no click within 5sec causes loss of active window focus

I have been using Photoshop since ver. 4 and have never seen this happen. The only difference is now I'm on Windows 7 64bit. Did not have this problem with XP. Current version CS3 Extended.
Problem: While using Lasso tool with the alt key if I do not make a mouse click in 5 seconds Photoshop's active window loses focus for a split second and then the first point of my selection and the last point will connect. Thus, wasting my time and my attempt at a selection.
I have task bar buttons to "Never combine". I see for that split second what appears to be another program button opening but it is so fast that I cannot see if there is a name on the task bar button. The current Photoshop button moves to the right and back too fast. This all happens very quickly as the window loses focus.
I first thought it was some another program but after many searches found nothing I can identify as the cause.
Right before posting this I had a thought and did a test that concluded in the 5 sec rule. For over a minute I held down the alt key and made a mouse click within the 5 second window of time and there was no loss of window focus. While still holding down the alt key in this same test but not making a mouse click within 5 seconds the window lost focus and the tool stopped with my selection.
I have a wireless Logitech M305 mouse that this morning updated the driver to its current version 5.20.51, Control Center version: 6.20.50.
I have not tested a wired mouse, yet.
Any help would be appreciated. Anyone else seen this? Windows 7 64 bit the culprit?????
Message was edited by: golfnut333

UPDATE
After I removed Photoshop from Norton 360's Administrative Settings_Silent Mode Settings_User-Specified Programs, I did not have the problem with the lasso tool that I first had with loss of window focus. I then put Photoshop back in the 360's settings and the lasso tool still worked, BUT...............
After a couple of days of not using Photoshop and turning computer on and off in that time, I tried Photoshop again and the same problem, it came back. Loss of focus after 5 seconds of not clicking mouse. So, once again I open Norton and took Photoshop out of the User-Specified Programs and the problem went away, no loss of focus.
So, I will see if after a couple of days of turning on and off the computer and NOT putting Photoshop in the Norton's User-Specified Programs setting if the problem stays fixed.
I don't have to have Photoshop in the Norton's setting I just thought that it would be a good idea so Norton didn't try to do any background processes or whatever while I was working in Photoshop or I was rendering a filter or something.
Another thought I also have the Full Screen Detection setting ON. I do use Photoshop in Full Screen mode so maybe when having both the Full Screen mode and User-Specified Programs setting selected it makes something go wacky.
Hope this helps anyone having the same problem I "did". Will post back after a few days to let you know if focus problem is gone.
If it does relieve the problem then I will leave Photoshop off the list in Norton. No sense in trying to fix something that really doesn't matter, really.
UPDATE 2
January 8, 2011, I tried the lasso tool again and it still appears to be working. I did my standard test of holding the alt key and clicking to make selections then not click for 5 seconds or more and I did not lose window focus. I do not know why the Norton 360 setting triggers the loss of focus but since I turned that setting off I'm not having any problem.
Will update again if something changes.
Anyone else out there with the same problem that was solved using this method?
Message was edited by: golfnut333

Magic Mouse Middle Click in Windows 7 64-bit Bootcamp?

Any ideas?, I found something (link below) but I'm not sure if its safe.
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/26184/magic-mouse-middle-click-in-windo ws-7-64-bit-bootcamp

That looks relatively safe but quite impractical in the long run.
I'm looking to achieve something similar, getting the middle click button to work, since it would be very useful through general productivity in terms of web browsing as well as for gaming such as Minecraft (building).
Anyone got any ideas as to how to achieve this? I know it's not possible to get this functionality in OS X without some third-party tool such as MagicPrefs, but surely it should be possible in Windows.
Thanks.

Windows open without clicking on them

In the past few weeks, I've had windows open on my Powerbook G4 without clicking on them. I'll leave the mouse pointer sitting on a file and it will suddenly open. As well, I'll be typing and the cursor will jump to another spot on the page and input in that location. Is there a setting that is turned on that I need to turn off? Is this a trackpad problem?

Check accessibility options....the control pane w/
the handicap logo on it.
Might also check trackpad options to see if you can
tweak the sensitivity.
Thanks for the suggestions, but I've been unable to find anything in those dialogue boxes that would solve the problem.

Disable window focus follows mouse without click

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