Here’s a term that long time computer users may not know, “Presence”. In a multi-tasking operating system like MS Windows or Mac OSX, the active or front most program (know as a “window” on all platforms) is said to have “Presence”. This means that keystrokes and mouse clicks are sent to this program/window.
What has always bugged me about “Presence” is the way the operating system handles it. As a power user I am often apt to start a new program while still typing into another. Even on a fast computer, some applications take several seconds to load. Knowing I will need a slow loading app in the near future, I will go ahead and start that app, then return to complete my pervious task while it loads. The annoying part is when the operating system suddenly gives “Presence” to the new loading application. The REALLY annoying thing happens if my previous app happens to be a word processor or text editor. For a moment when “Presence” shifts I am blinding sending keystrokes into the new application. This has on more than one occasion caused strange things to happen. I’m not quite sure why it happens, but some applications take “Presence” on opening while others do not.
Speed changing applications is one thing that while it annoys me, it’s narrowly my own fault. A very real design flaw is the pop-up error message that takes “Presence”. There have been many times that I have been happily pounding away at my keyboard and see the flash of a dialog box. But because my fingers are outrunning my head, I will hit a key that clears off the message before I have a chance to read it.
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The term you’re looking for is “focus”. “Presence” is is a telecom term about indicating that someone is available in the sense they have a device turned on or a software client running.
Many system link “focus” to z-level. For example, both Windows and the Mac will only give focus to a window after raising it to remove any overlaps from other windows. The default behavior of Windows and Macs is described as “Click to focus and click to raise”.
In the olden days (before the Linux community tried to make Unix act more like Windows), the default scheme was “Focus follows mouse with click to raise”. I think you would like this better. Focus goes to whatever fragment of window is underneath the mouse cursor. When your app starts, focus stays with the window under the mouse even though the new app is at the top of the z-stack.
On Windows you can download TweakUI from Microsoft and use it to configure Windows to this.
I haven’t looked to see if it’s do-able on a Mac.
If you decide to pursue this, be advised there are two flavors of focus-follows-mouse: strict and sloppy. “Strict” means the window unconditionally loses focus if the mouse leaves the window. “Sloppy” means the window will retain focus until the cursor is hovering over /another/ window.
I prefer the latter. I long ago gave up on this battle, but your post is inspiring me renew the struggle…
n
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