Focus Follows Mouse (Vista)
Posted by duane on December 12th, 2008
I’ve use a dual monitor layout on my work computer and quite often I will have one monitor that has virtual machines or remote desktop sessions running and often have my other windows maximized on the other monitor. I’ve found it kind of annoying to have to click in the different windows as I move back and forth between the two monitors and so I did a little digging and found that Vista has the “Ease of Access Center” that allows you to easily (read: no registry hacks) set the focus follows mouse feature. Now when I move my mouse back and forth between the monitors I can start typing right away.
Here is what I did:
- Press the Windows key and type “ease of access”
- Select “Ease of Access Center”
- Scroll to the bottom of this screen.
- Click “Make the mouse easier to use”
- Check “Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse”
- Click “Save” and you are done.
Bookmark to:
January 20th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Thanks! Alas, this also causes the window to auto-raise. Grr! Any idea how to FocusFollowsMouse without AutoRaise? Thanks!
Sincerely,
-daniel
January 21st, 2009 at 8:20 am
Thanks for this tip. It would be nice if windows could change focus without bringing given window to the front.
January 21st, 2009 at 9:53 am
I’m not sure if there are any registry settings to prevent the raising of the window. That was actually the action i was looking for when I found the setting.
I will add that I only used this setting for a day or two.. there were a few applications that didn’t work out for as well as I thought it would.. come to think of it, being able to have the focus follow without the window being pulled to the foreground would probably be perfect. I will have to see if I can find a setting for that.
February 20th, 2009 at 9:49 am
I found this article that offers some hope for non-developers for keeping the focused window in the background: http://dasz.at/index.php/2008/01/focus-follow-mouse-or-not/