Click Through

[Rezun]

Hi there,

I recently switched to a Mac, coming from a Windows background. There are a few things about the Mac OS that are quite annoying wich I'm trying to compensate through tools.
One major downside (for me) I've yet to "fix" is the click behavior of background windows. In Mac OS there is this "feature" that prevents a mouse click from performing an action on a background window and brings it to the front instead. I really would like to disable this behavior and have "click through" enabled for all applications and all windows consistently. I've searched for such a tool but didn't find anything. Does somebody know if something linke this exists? I've found a tool called "Klicko" but it does the exact opposite of what I am trying to achieve.

Thanks in advance

 

[cradom]

Might not be what you're looking for but try holding down the command key to interact with non-focused windows without them becoming focused.

 

[Rezun]

This is interesting but that feature works just as inconsistent as the whole click through itself.
The thing is that i don't want to pay attention to wich window is focused in normal workflow.

 

[Sawday]

Isn't it a definition of a window being 'Focused' that that is the one that a mouse click will be actioned?

 

[Rezun]

@Sawday
I'm coming from a windows background an the definition there is more like:
A window being focused is the one that receives the keyboard input.
I know that this is a controversial topic but for me it's just this simple: i want a click on (for example) a list of items to allways behave the same whether the parent window has the focus or not. I may be one of few but the behavior on the Mac in a multi monitor environment just drives me nuts.

 

[chas_m]

I know you can close, minimize or resize Finder windows that are not "in focus" (clicking on the red, yellow or green lights will not cause the window to come to the forefront), but apart from that I'm aware of any way to do what you're asking.

I've been using primarily Macs for so long that I can't even understand why you'd WANT to do this. Clicking and doing stuff to things that are not your focus doesn't make any sense to me anymore. Sorry.

 

[Sawday]

OP - Can you give us an example where this is possible in Windows so we can try it out with some widely used/available software? Also, we'd be interested as Chas_m asks why you would want to do this.

 

[triptolemus]

I, too, was annoyed by this after my switch. It's right up there with getting accustomed to the Command key instead of the control key. It took about one day of conscious effort, then became habit, so much so that I now almost always hit the Alt key on Windows at work now.

My adjustment for the click on inactive behavior was to simply double- click when I wish to interact with an inactive window. Again, it's now second nature. No tool required.

 

[Rezun]

@Sawday: There is no click prevention for inactive windows in Windows at all. So the just try clicking on a link in a browser while another application has the focus. Et voila: the browser will just open the link.
To give you an example why I prefer that:
I have 2 Monitors with 2 separate open windows, Chrome and iTunes for example.
I'm browsing while switching tracks sometimes. Most of the time I'm double clicking a track in iTunes and it gets selected but doesn't start to play. So i hesitate, waiting for iTunes to play the song until i remember that it hadn't had the focus...
I just don't get the point in this behavior... For me it's just the other way around: i don't understand why anybody would like it this way.

 

[Discerptor]

Apple's frameworks allow developers to enable/disable click-through (what this functionality is indeed called in official documentation) for every single control on a window. This is something just left to the developer's discretion, because they are expected to follow certain Human Interface Guidelines, such as disabling click-through for controls that could be damaging if hit by accident (like a delete button with no confirmation dialog). You'd probably be best off asking the specific app developers to change what in their application windows can be clicked through to, or to provide some preference for overriding them. In the short term, you might want to find applications whose developers have enabled click through on the items you want to hit while another window is in focus.

 

[J.Fo]

i don't understand why anybody would like it this way.

Let me give you an example of when a full click through is not ideal for a user.

At work I use a Windows XP computer with dual monitors. In monitor 1, I run my browser, which runs the software I do most of my work on. I try to keep this monitor free of any other programs because I want to be able to access my main program easily and work on it without distractions. Monitor 2 is where I place my secondary programs: Outlook, Word, Windows Explorer, and Excel to name a few. (I bounce around a lot of different programs at work.) Often these windows stack up on top of each other, and since I tend to not have windows running at full screen, I can see them overlapping.

Now, lets say I want to get at something in Outlook. I just ran a search in my Inbox for an email with a particular subject heading, and while that was running, I pulled up something on Word, and opened another file from the Explorer. I now want to go back to Outlook at view the results of my search. I can maybe see the lefthand sidebar, and not much else, so I click somewhere on it to activate the window and bring it to the front. What happens? Well, if my click happened to be over another mail folder, the system selects it, takes me there, and I lose the search results. Now I have to go back into my Inbox, rerun the same search and wait for the results to pull in again. Thankfully, the results of a search usually pull in results much faster if you run the query a second time, but it's still a pain in the neck to have to rerun it.

In that scenario, the click through is absolutely the last thing I want my system to do. All I wanted to was to bring Outlook to the front so that I could look at it. I didn't want to select a different mail folder. The same goes for other programs that might do something similar.

Click through might be ideal if you have a lot of screen real estate and don't run a lot of apps at once. However, if you have lots of stuff on top of each other, it's often faster and easier to use that first click to activate the window so you don't select something you didn't intend to.

In a similar fashion, you know what drives me crazy on Windows? The fact that I can only scroll on an active window. On a Mac, I can scroll on an inactive window by simply placing my mouse cursor over it, and scrolling. I don't even have to click it. So, for instance, I can be running Safari and have Twitter running off to the side. I can drag my mouse cursor over to the Twitter window and scroll up and down without having to make it active. I love this, and I can't tell you how many times I forget that my work computer doesn't do it.

 

[Sawday]

J.Fo - Well explained. I'm with you on this one.

 

[chas_m]

J.Fo: Boy are you ever going to love Lion.

 

[Rezun]

@J.Fo
First of all: You're absolutely right about the scrolling. That's one thing I really love about the Mac. Especially in combination with the great track pad.
I get the point about your example. This does make sense. But because I'm used to that behavior it's just natural for me to switch to background windows with the alt+tab combo. I dont't think about the position of a window. if its visible: i use it. if not: i use alt+tab to bring it to the front. I wouldn't perform a click on a window to just bring it to the front (except the title bar is visible and i found that window right away). On my Mac I couldn't live without WindowFlow wich tabs through windows rather than applications.

The thing is: i hate to be forced to care about the focus of applications. It's hard to imagine that there is no option or tool to change this behavior because there is Klicko wich easily does the opposite. I'm a developer myself but i know litte to nothing about the Aqua API. I cannot believe that it's so hard to intercept a mouse click, get the underlying window, check if it's not focused and bring it in focus and then forward the click event.
So my point in this post was to ask if anyone knows such a tool. I guess it does not make sense arguing about habits and preferences.

 

[Discerptor]

Unfortunately, due to reasons I stated in my post, I don't think it would be possible to write a program that does the opposite of what Klicko does. The developer of Klicko has stated as much. That said, what he proposed could be done as an alternative might actually suit your needs pretty well, since you never have windows overlap and wouldn't be perturbed by the window coming to the front anyway. It seems like it could be achieved relatively simply. It might be worth asking him about it.

A note on the Window Flow thing: there are some keyboard shortcuts you may not be aware of on OS X that help with switching between windows.

Cmd+Tab: Switches between active Applications (I imagine this is what you're familiar with)

Cmd+`: Move focus to the next window in the active Application (most people never learn this one, and it's a shame)

Ctrl+F4: Move focus to active or next window (This is exactly what you're used to Alt-Tab doing on Windows)

 

[Rezun]

@Discerptor
Thanks a lot! I've totally overlooked that FAQ from the Klicko developer. I should ask him about how to achieve what he describes.
I'm german. So it's cmd+< rather than cmd+` for me (had to search for that). But you're right. That command really seems to be useful. I have to try it out.
I didn't know ctrl+f4 either but it's quite hard to hit those keys with one hand.

 

[J.Fo]

J.Fo: Boy are you ever going to love Lion.

Uh oh. Do you mean that in a good way or a bad way? I can't tell if this is sarcasm of not.

 

[chas_m]

I mean it in a good way. Lion unifies the whole Expose/Spaces/Dashboard thing into Mission Control, which I think will be a huge boon to productivity for people, particularly like the OP.

 

[Discerptor]

@Discerptor
Thanks a lot! I've totally overlooked that FAQ from the Klicko developer. I should ask him about how to achieve what he describes.
I'm german. So it's cmd+< rather than cmd+` for me (had to search for that). But you're right. That command really seems to be useful. I have to try it out.
I didn't know ctrl+f4 either but it's quite hard to hit those keys with one hand.

You can change the keyboard shortcut in the Keyboard section of System Preferences. It's in the Keyboard & Text Input category of Keyboard Shortcuts. Double click on the ^F4 on the right and change it something you like better.

 

[HelpdeskRules]

I too was annoyed by this at the start but I gradually began to like it - infact I find myself at work moving my mouse over to another window and trying to scroll it up and down without clicking on the window first!

I'm no longer annoyed with this feature and actually think it be part of Windows XP that I use at work!