Point To Focus

In X-windows, and possible other window managers out there, you can set a mode allowing you to move the mouse pointer over a given window and the focus for keyboard will switch to that window. Very useful when you need to type in one window and see what is in another window.

-- JeffBay

Isn't this more commonly called "Focus follows mouse" policy?

Moved from PointToFocusInWindows

X-windows allows a user configurable setting for two possible methods of moving the focus from one window to another. I've been wondering if there is any share-ware or other method of changing Windows to allow PointToFocus instead of ClickToFocus.

Anybody know anything about such a beast?

-- JeffBay

TweakUI, that ever useful Power Toy, can do this for NT 4.0, 2000 & XP. For 95 there was a separate Power Toy to achieve the same end.

This TweakUI thing is quite good (in that it DoesWhatItSaysOnTheTin) but it can cause some *very* bizarre behaviour with things like modal dialogs, combo lists and so on. Especially the fake ones that some programmers use to make their toolbars do something slightly out of the ordinary. Certainly I got tired of bugging the developers of our main product to fix this - they said it wasn't important because it's nonstandard software. I just use Linux now instead, problem solved.

This works pretty poorly unless you're running the "unclutter" program. Unclutter hides your cursor after a set number of seconds (I set mine to 1 second). A common GUI idiom is to click the text that you're going to type or read, and then toss your cursor off to the corner of the screen. Try doing this with point-to-focus and you'll be sad. If you use unclutter, all you have to do is hover over the text and reach back for the keyboard. By the time you get there your cursor is out of your face. Faster in the long run.

In any decent text-input app, your pointer should turn into something useful. Anywhere else, well, it's tiny. I hardly ever find it is in the way. On the other hand, I don't ever run lower than about 1600x1200, so that might make a difference. I find any tiny and very uncommon annoyance from the mouse pointer being in the way is hugely outweighed by the annoyance of click to focus. Shudder. But even if I was stuck with both a small screen and an OS/wm that doesn't suppor point to focus properly (i.e. win32), I can't imagine "tossing my cursor off to the corner of the screen..."

The two things I hate about all the PointToFocus systems I've used:

Losing window focus if you knock the mouse accidentally and the pointer's no longer in the window - even if it's not in any other window either.
- Many WindowManagers have what is known as "sloppy focus"--moving from a window to the background (aka the RootWindow?) does not cause the previous window to use focus.
To bring the window to the front, you not only have to click, but click the titlebar of the window.
- In the WM I'm using now (MotifWindowManager? running on Solaris), simply clicking the frame brings the window to the front. The title bar is the easiest area to click...of course, is is possible to have a window such that it is visible but the entire frame is covered. I imagine there is a WM somewhere that can be configured such that clicking anywhere in the window brings it to the front.

Neither of these appears to be necessarily implied by PointToFocus, but all the implementations I've seen have these behaviours. And they really do get in my way.

--KarlKnechtel

Enlightenment supports both sloppy focus and click-to-raise (not just in the border).

There are a couple of wms that allow raise-on-focus with a configurable delay, which at least alleviates the raising problem.

CategoryGui