There are popular apps whose main or auxiliary UI is a popup window that gets focus without the app becoming the active app.
Some such apps that I use:
- Witch (application switcher)
- Raycast
- Things (quick entry popup)
Now, it seems that the app-specific shortcuts in BTT are triggered based on the active app instead of the focused app. This means that if I have defined a BTT shortcut for app X that conflicts with the functionality of a popup app, then the use of said popup app is hindered if invoked while X is active.
Based on my own experience, it would make more sense for the focused app to be the one associated with BTT’s app-specific shortcuts since that is the one the user is interacting with. In fact, I’m unable to come up with a realistic example where I wouldn’t want it to work like that.
(I’m aware that the issue can be worked around by using conditional triggers, but that gets messy. It would be a lot less messy, though, if the passthrough feature were implemented.)