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When I click on an application in OSX, this focuses the application and raises it to the front, but does not pass the click through to the application. However, I frequently wish to focus an application to perform an action, and my Windows/Linux training has taught me to click where I want my click to register. In OSX, this becomes a problem because I click once to focus and a second time to trigger a click event - but the window responds as though to a double click - when toggling something with a click, the window focus click is only treated as a click when I send another, toggling the object twice.

What setting(s) should I change to support either passing that first click like other popular WIMP GUIs or to consume that first click completely and use it only for focusing the window? If not settings, are there software that solve this problem?

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  • Related questions about enabling focus follows mouse: 27306, 34446, 98310
    – Lri
    Commented May 30, 2013 at 0:53
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    @LauriRanta I really don't want any kind of focus follows mouse please thank you.
    – Iiridayn
    Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 1:41
  • Isn't focus follows mouse without auto-raise (or without any visual changes) basically the same as always enabling click-through? FFM with auto-raise is not really usable on OS X though.
    – Lri
    Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 1:54
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    @LauriRanta They are not the same: I would like keyboard focus to remain where it is no matter where I hover my mouse. Though it is possible to force "click-through" using focus follows mouse, this would result in focus following mouse, which is not what I am looking for.
    – Iiridayn
    Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 3:26
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    Some applications does send the click through. For example the calculator. Open the calculator, type some numbers in it, focus another window and then click the C calculator's button: the typed numbers are replaced by a zero.
    – user61755
    Commented Nov 6, 2013 at 11:37

1 Answer 1

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Pending a better answer - in Cocoa applications on OSX I can force a "click through" to the lower window without focusing it by ⌘-clicking. This appears to be a good solution - just needs to be more discoverable.

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  • 1
    This fixes most of my grudges, except for putting focus directly into a text field Commented Jun 17, 2015 at 13:47

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