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

There is also the related issue of raise-on-click. Under OSX each time a window is clicked, it is also raised, thus potentially hiding other windows. This is problematic when working with copy/paste from two windows where one of them covers most of the screen. I like to keep a global (active in all workspaces) notepad from which I copy/paste stuff (could be anything from commands, text, todo items etc). This is challenging under OSX. It would be nice to have an option to disable raise-on-click.

Answer 2

Solution: Because I was so used to autoraise in Windows I badly missed it on the Mac. The solution I found for the Mac is Zooom (yes, three o's). It has an autoraise function. You can even set milliseconds to wait before autoraise. Can't live without it. Autoraise is an option in prefs as you can see in the screenshot https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23203/zooom http://coderage-software.com/zooom/index.html

Answer 3

chunkwm supports this too (by default I believe): chunkwm

Answer 4

Use Dwell feature in mac. Go to Accessibility -> keyboard -> Accessibility keyboard (I'm on Catalina)

Click here for more info

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Answer 5

Focus follows mouse is now possible in macOS, Mojave in my case, using chunkwm. See this Stack Overflow response for a "no autoraise" solution. Autoraise is activated by leaving

chunkc set ffm_disable_autoraise         0

in ~/.chunkwmrc.

Edit 2019-09-12:

chunkwm has been superseded by yabai. To install:

brew tap koekeishiya/formulae
brew install yabai
mkdir -p ~/.config/yabai/
printf 'yabai -m config focus_follows_mouse autoraise' >> ~/.config/yabai/yabairc
brew services start yabai

Answer 6

Give DwellClick a try. Although, it's not for its intended purpose, the auto-click behavior has a side effect similar to auto-raise or focus-follows-mouse.

Personally, I only use the feature of left clicking after my cursor movement comes to rest, but there's also clicking with modifiers and a window dragging assist that's quite handy.

It's also a little frustrating while web browsing since you'll either want to disable the app or be more conscious of where the cursor rests (e.g. not on any links or buttons you don't intend to activate).