How to make a non-active window also react to mouse clicks immediately, rather than having it become only active?

I've been using a Mac at work for a couple of months now, but after getting used to it there still are some annoyances that I'm trying to eliminate. If I have multiple windows open, clicking on a non-active window will activate it - but the application does not register the click. Coming from a Windows background, this makes the UI feel very sluggish, as I feel I'm spending far more clicks than I should.

Is there a way to configure this behavior? I know there are utilities available for Windows to tweak things like this, are there any similar tools available for Mac OS?

Pieter Witvoet

Posted 2010-04-07T07:26:24.460

Reputation: 171

This feature is known as xmouse - I searched for it actively a while back and kept reading that OS-X is basically unable to support it. I'd love to find out otherwise! Curiously enough, most windows will receive / honor scroll events even when they're not front-most; just not click events. – JRobert – 2010-05-09T15:25:51.520

Answers

What application specifically? I tested with both Safari and Finder and found that clicks in an inactive window will both focus the window as well as activate a click event.

Josh

Posted 2010-04-07T07:26:24.460

Reputation: 7 540

Now that you mention it, some apps do indeed receive click events (Finder, Terminal). Most other apps don't: XCode, Firefox, TextWrangler, Thunderbird, iChat... – Pieter Witvoet – 2010-04-07T13:53:08.440

The “click through” behavior is definitely under the control of individual applications (individual “views”, actually). See -acceptsFirstMouse: in NSView (one of the fundamental base Cocoa UI classes).

– Chris Johnsen – 2010-07-10T04:02:27.740

Thanks for the info, Chris. So much for consistency, but oh well. – Pieter Witvoet – 2010-09-06T11:55:00.810

Not exactly what you ask, but you can try Zooom/2 — one of its features is brining windows to front on hover after customizable time and that is just one of many features.

Also not excactly what you are asking: holding ⌘ and clicking background windows will fire click event without activating window.

tig

Posted 2010-04-07T07:26:24.460

Reputation: 3 906

Option + Click does work for me (on Chrome at least) -- it brings a non-active to foreground and fires the click event. – Fabrício Matté – 2015-05-23T16:59:26.760

Indeed, not really what I was looking for. The ⌘+click 'trick' either doesn't work for me or it's also application-specific, like normal clicks. Strangely enough, some clicks are always honored (specifically buttons like the close, minimize and maximize ones), regardless of what application I'm dealing with... – Pieter Witvoet – 2010-09-06T11:49:05.570

As Chris Johnsen said, there is an option to ignore such clicks, but I think that this could not be changed for system provided buttons like close, minimize and maximize – tig – 2010-09-06T21:15:04.490