Focus Follow Mouse … or not
Coming from a very comfortable and powerful Linux desktop, I despise the lowest common Win3.1-denominator, single-workspace, cluttered-and-stacked-windows user experience of the Windows Desktop. Today I had a little look around what can be done for this, but no luck. The best what windows offers is calling out to SystemParametersInfo, where I could set “Focus Follows Mouse” and “Do not Raise On Focus”. I wrote a minimal app to set these two parameters (see attachement).
Of course that was too good to be true …
While this indeed activated windows by pointing the mouse at them without clicking, it has one big shortcoming that — in the end — brought me back to the default behaviour: Visual Studio is a incredible attention whore and raises itself when focused! This really kills the whole usefulness of FFM, since it hides other windows I would like to have had visible on top of it while developing. Thanks Microsoft .. for nothing!
Update(2008-01-31): While lying away at night, I had a epiphany about why the Studio pushes itself into the foreground. This surely must be a hack to make the window visible when debugging. I’m not sure yet, whether that consoles me …
