Make OSX windows accept first click?

[Nocturnal]

I've been searching for an answer to this for months. Inactive windows in OSX require at least one click to make them active (bring them into focus) before they'll accept any further mouse input. This is incredibly annoying to me and greatly reduces my productivity. I know it was set up that way to help users avoid accidentally clicking on a button or something in the window before they can even see what's going on in the window. The first click brings the window to the front, and only then do that window's buttons and controls pay full attention; otherwise everything is disabled until after it sees one click.

But that also means that you are wasting a ton of clicks just activating windows all the time, especially when you bounce back and forth constantly like I do. You end up clicking everything twice. For example, if I'm using more than one browser window at a time side by side, then most of the time I can't just click a link in a web page. I end up clicking the link twice-once to activate that browser window, then again to actually click the link. Sometimes, the link will click the first time--if it happens to be in the active browser window. But it's exhaustive to try to keep checking which window is active before clicking a link just so I'll know if it'll work the first time I click the link (they look virtually identical and my windows rarely overlap).

It gets even worse when a program such as Propellerhead Reason has multiple windows that you use at the same time. Just to work within that program requires twice as many clicks as it would take for the same program on Windows. You can't even use a scrollbar without making its window active first. Imagine if your car was like that and you had to tap the radio first before you could change the station.

I am quite adept at clicking on a blank space inside a window if I only want to bring it to the front without activating any of its buttons, controls, or links. OS X seems to think otherwise. Is there any tweak out there that gets around this?

Thanks!
Nocturnal

[hayne]

I don't think there is any easy way to do this.
It's the sort of thing that you might implement via a "haxie" - so check if Unsanity.com offers anything like this. It might be possible to write an InputManager that handled the Cocoa method 'acceptsFirstMouse' - but that would of course only work for Cocoa apps.
It might help to know that the usual term for this is "click-through". For example, you will find it mentioned on Apple's user-interface guidelines: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html?http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000894-TP6

[tbsingleton73]

Nocturnal,

Have you tried ⌘Tab and/or ⌘` to change programs?
I don't "seem"to have the same problem about double-clicking to make things active, but maybe your meaning something different.

[ALT147]

Inactive windows in OSX require at least one click to make them active (bring them into focus) before they'll accept any further mouse input.

Sorry Nocturnal, I don't have a solution for you.

But in checking what you wrote I came across the inconsistency of this 'feature'. In some applications, you do need to click once to activate a window, in others, you don't. This actually annoys me more: I wish it was either one way or the other for all apps.

Last week I was in Safari, I option-clicked an Excel window to hide Safari and make Excel active, and didn't realise that that click had shifted an entire data column down one row. It took me several minutes to work out why my graphs had changed.

But I do agree with tbsingleton that using Command-` to change windows within an application is very useful, and may help you.

[Nocturnal]

Thanks for trying to help, guys.

Unfortunately, cycling through windows using cmd-tab is about 10 times more cumbersome than just clicking on the window I want twice. I can already see the window I need to be in, because I have 4 monitors on this mac, and nothing ever really overlaps. I see the button or link I want to click, and I just want to click the thing without begging OS X to let me click it.

To make it worse, programs are buggy with this. In firefox for example, if you click inside of an html form, that will not bring the window in focus. You have to click somewhere else in the target window, then inside the form you want to fill out. In other programs, if a contextual menu is up in one window, then the first click in another window closes the menu, the second click actually selects the window, then the third click is the one that actually works.

I'm just going to have to accept that evertything on a mac will take me 2 clicks instead of 1; 3 clicks instead of 2. Nudge doesn't seem to work on Tiger, even after logging out and back in. *sniff*

Thanks :-)
Derek

[Hal Itosis]

double-click

[Blackberry]

GIMP comes with a little utility to enable XWindows-style "focus follows mouse" focus switching. If you used that, I imagine that no click would be left behind.