Focus-follows-mouse (plus auto-raise) on Mac OS X

Question

(I don\'t want to hear about how crazy I am to want that! :)

Focus-follows-mouse is also known as point-to-focus, pointer focus, and (in some implementations) sloppy

Answer 1

So I decided to improve again on the work I did on the MouseFocus.app which still had some flaws. Those are fixed now. I renamed the whole thing to "AutoRaise" to better reflect what this tool does: When you hover a window it will be raised to the front (with a delay of your choosing) and gets the focus. The tool can be downloaded here. To use it, copy it to your /Applications/ folder making sure it is executable (chmod 700 AutoRaise). Then double click it from within Finder. To quickly toggle it on/off you can use the applescript below and paste it into an automator service workflow. Then bind the created service to a keyboard shortcut via System Preferences|Keyboard|Shortcuts.

Update (29-03-2017): The AutoRaise binary has been updated. If no delay has been specified on the command line, it will now also look for an AutoRaise.delay file in the same home folder. This is particularly useful when using the applescript below because 'launch application' does not support command line arguments. The delay should be specified in units of 50ms 20ms. For example to specify a delay of 20ms run this command once in a terminal: 'echo 1 > ~/AutoRaise.delay'

on run {input, parameters}
    tell application "Finder"
        if exists of application process "AutoRaise" then
            quit application "/Applications/AutoRaise"
            display notification "AutoRaise Stopped"
        else
            launch application "/Applications/AutoRaise"
            display notification "AutoRaise Started"
        end if
    end tell
    return input
end run

Update (18-04-2019): The source https://github.com/sbmpost/AutoRaise

Update (05-06-2020): The default delay has been set to 2 and polling time was reduced. These settings prevent unintended window raising when moving the mouse quickly (to reach the top menu for instance). Also a warp mouse feature has been added and a memory leak has been fixed. For further details check out the README