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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

Nope, what you're describing is a mistake in focus-follows-mouse, one which has been made more than once.

In real, XWin-style focus-follows-mouse, the window you mouse over gets the focus, but, isn't pulled to the front. If you click, it gets the front and the focus.

I use Moom, a semi-tile snap-style window wrangler, and a widescreen with three panels. What I want to do is just slide the cursor over and start typing, but I have to remember to click, and often enough I just don't.

The One True Wiki has a nice discussion of the subject: https://wiki.c2.com/?FocusFollowsMouse

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I remember setting some reasonable “raise timeout” and it worked well for me. For one use case, I had a workflow with two full-height overlapping windows (vim, xterm) and little mouse shifts toggled them up/focused.

Alt-tab didn’t work because its mru usually gets spoiled by other (browser) windows. If only there was a setting that fixed alt-tab mru into a stack. Alt-tab-tab to switch to app which started second may be much better than mru for some workflows, because you can always predict what it does with certainty of 1.

I actually have it set to not raise even on click; I often want to click just one thing in a window that is behind other windows. Moving a window brings it to front and I bind windows-click-drag to move a window. That lets me raise any window I like.

same. i don't raise on click. this is incredibly useful when a smaller window is in the foreground--and perhaps a window underneath is maximized--and i just need to select/copy something from the background real quick. the main task i am working on is in the foreground, and i don't want its window to immediately vanish from my sight because it's mentally and visually disruptive (in fact, i usually don't want to blast every other window out of sight when the maximized window raises either). i will easily raise the background window when i need to (in a variety of ways, depending upon whether i am currently using keyboard or mouse); meanwhile, i can lazily focus it and interact with it while all my windows stay put. it's very calming.

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