Would it be possible to add a "Focus Follow Mouse" feature

Hi,

I would like to know if it would be possible to add a "Focus Follow Mouse" feature as seen on Linux window managers.

It works in a way that when the mouse pointer is over a window that window automatically get focused without the need to click on it.

You may be able to hook on the "scrolling" sub-system as the mouse already scroll the window bellow the mouse pointer without the need for clicking on the window.

You could use a MySIMBL for that (winbuddy from w0lfschild I guess or some other plugin)

+1!
is there a "mouse stopped moving" trigger? If so, could add one of the following actions:

⌃⌥-click (control-option-click) - switches focus without raising window

⌘-click (command-click) - clicks in window without switching focus

Question - is it possible to add an "Extras" feature similar to "Move windows" and "Resize windows" that simply did not do either? But with the "Bring window under cursor to front ..." enabled, this new feature would raise the window to the front. That way a user can decide how the mouse movement across windows works (with respect to the stackoverflow article referenced above - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/98310/focus-follows-mouse-plus-auto-raise-on-mac-os-x) by selecting the modifier keys prior to moving the mouse. The default movement (with no modifier keys) would be native mac (for the UX reasons mentioned on stackoverflow).

p.s. this is a little bit removed from this UX topic but somewhat related - it would be a nice additional configuration option to allow a user to select the color, thickness, and translucency of a border around the window with focus. This way a user can select the extent of an additional visual cue of which window has focus. This would be convenient even when the mouse is not moving. Thanks so much! (yes there are apps for this, but having it here and integrated would be nice)

Any chance of getting this feature added? There is a utility that does it GitHub - sbmpost/AutoRaise: AutoRaise (and focus) a window when hovering over it with the mouse, but would be much better if we could just use BTT for this.

BTT already has the pieces to do this, like auto-raise, so it would seem to be mostly implementing a UI to configure it. Auto-raise after delay is what I'm looking for.

Bring moving window to front. Please use same functionality to implement this.

Any chance of this being implemented? Seems like low-hanging fruit.

I’ll add my question to this. On Windows and Linux, I’m used to being able to click links and buttons in a secondary window right away. However, on Mac, I first need to click the window to bring it into focus.

It would be great to have an option for the focus to change directly under the cursor.

Try AutoRaise in github for now...

I've also recently wondered the same. I think if there's a way to use click and not tap (annotation 2 in the screenshot) in the following trigger maybe it will work:

I've tested with the above setup, but since it is a tap, there are some miss-clicks happening, otherwise I think it is working.

maybe I will add a simple trigger „hovered window did change“, which could be used in combination with the „activate hovered window“ action. However I don’t really want to get into all the edge cases of a real „focus follows mouse“

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Constantly checking whether a window is in focus might consume too much CPU time. However, I thought of a potentially more efficient solution. A condition could be set so that if I click in a window and that window is inactive, it would act as a double-click. The first click activates the focus, and the second click presses the button/link, etc. It wouldn’t work quite as seamlessly since buttons or links wouldn’t highlight on hover, but it would save one click. :slightly_smiling_face: Do you think that could work?

there are too many edge cases for this to work properly. For example apps can decide per view item whether they allow „unfocused clicks“, cmd+ click always „goes through“ etc.