Computer Help II

Stevey's Blog Rants writes:The Big Focus Issue

Ever since the Dawn of Time (Jan 1, 1970), people have been bitching about the lack of focus-follows-mouse on Mac computers. They started complaining about it fourteen years before the first Mac was even released, that's how bad it was.

Every time they bring it up on Mac forums, the Mac users with non-Unix backgrounds ask "what's that?" And then a bunch of wrong answers start flying around, with a few right answers interspersed but drowned out in the noise.

So let me tell you what it is first, in case you're not from a Unix background. Focus-follows-mouse means that when you move the mouse cursor, the window under the cursor gets the keyboard focus. But saying that confuses Mac people who all assume that "focused" is synonymous with "foreground", because that's the way it works on the Mac.

The confusion stems from the fact that focus-follows-mouse comes in not one, but two, yes that's right, two yummy flavors.

Flavor #1: autofocus — in this flavor, reminiscent perhaps of a sweet juicy mandarin orange, the window under the mouse gets the keyboard focus but does not come to the front. This allows you to interact with a partially-obscured window. It's especially useful when you have a terminal or shell window open, and it's running a background process that you want to observe... you guessed it, in the background! You leave a little bit of the bottom and/or side of the window uncovered so you can keep an eye on the output.

Real-life use case: let's say you're a programmer who writes in C++. You will, of course, spend most of your working day playing Solitaire and reading reddit, because C++ is too goddamned stupid to do anything but gigantic, slow batch compiles of the entire dependency universe. So you have at least four windows open at any given time: your editor, your compile shell, your browser, and your Solitaire game. You've spent a lot of time adjusting your window configuration to be "just right", and unless you have a 30-inch screen (for instance, because you work for Google), your windows overlap.

Watching your compile status is like checking your rear-view mirror; you do it every 7 seconds or so, even though you know the compiler will take a minimum of 15 minutes. It's like a slow-motion train wreck that you just can't tear your eyes from, even while playing Solitaire and reading reddit. And every once in a while you'll need to enter a command (e.g. "make", after you've fixed the umpteenth compiler warning about doing a perfectly valid type conversion). The last thing you want is to have to click the window to bring it to the front just so you can type "make", because then you'll need to go futz around with your window configuration again to get the window to go to back to whatever Z-location it used to be in the window stack.

I know it doesn't sound like a big effort, but programmers are really, really lazy, and they like to minimize motion. They'd use feeder tubes if the Health Department would let them.

So in the autofocus flavor, it's important that the window that gets the focus does not automatically come to the front.

Flavor #2: autoraise — in this pungent flavor, somewhat evocative of a slightly overripe Durian fruit left in the tropical sun for about nine hours, moving the mouse into a new window automatically brings that window to the front. In the especially horrible default configuration, it comes to the front instantly, so the act of moving your mouse across the screen makes it look like that old "rectangles" screen saver, and your window configuration is utterly obliterated in under a second.

Many programmers feel that autofocus is delicate butterfly and autoraise is a big, stinky buffalo. That's just how they feel about it. No accounting for taste. I, for one, think of autoraise as a big, stinky, deceased buffalo carcass that someone thoughtfully dragged into my living room while I was on vacation, probably towards the beginning of the vacation, and then they turned up my thermostat to 110°F, closed the windows and tossed a Durian fruit at the wall for good measure.

But maybe it's just me.

So one of the most annoying aspects of the whole "how do I get focus-follows-mouse behavior on my Mac" debate is that everyone assumes you mean autoraise. There are a number of packages out there, most of them commercial, that offer autoraise as a feature, and Mac users point you to these products and then get all smugly about how they've solved your problem and how Macs still rule the universe, when in fact the problem is still festering away.

It's no wonder people still use Linux as their UI. That one feature alone keeps hordes of programmers from switching. (And yes, you can get the behavior on Windows using their TweakUI power tools, so some programmers use Windows as a Linux shell with a decent media player.)...It's amazing how so many people choose to rationalize stuff they're forced to live with. Why not just admit it sucks? Sometimes stuff sucks! C'mon, admit it! Jeez!