Pointer Focus Free

[Josette Werst]

Highlightmouse pointer with a colored circle, and when you click the mouse button the ring animation can show your mouse click actions to your audience. Keystroke visualization can show your audience which shortcuts you have just pressed. This feature can help you make your demonstration more understandable.Mouse Spotlight - when you choose this tool, it will dim the screen and put a "spotlight" around your mouse pointer. This can focus your audience's attention to the area of interest.On-Screen Annotation Pen - when you choose this tool, you can use your mouse pointer annotate any part of the screen with customized color and pen width.Screen Magnifier - when you choose this tool, you can show your audience details of any part on the screen.Android Remote Control - You can use Android App to remote control mouse actions and PointerFocus functions.

Under Windows 10, I tried the regedit Xmouse changes mentioned in this link that were originally meant for Windows 8: -on-xmouse-active-window-tracking-focus-follows-mouse-pointer-feature-in-windows-8-1-windows-8-and-windows-7/

Use X-Mouse Controls (Wayback Machine link), it's the closest I've found to true Focus Follows Mouse, and it has some options to tweak. It's a small open-source utility that doesn't require installing or rebooting, and saves you from changing the registry yourself.

As far as I've experimented, I can use the keyboard to search for files/programs after pressing the Win key. Also, Start and Notifications menu don't go away before I can use them, even with the raise-on-hover option, as you can set a small delay for the behavior (one or two hundred ms will suffice), which gives you more than enough room to move the pointer to the new window.

Constants & types retrieved from the SystemParametersInfoA docs. It seems the pvParam arg (a void pointer) is re-interpreted as a boolean for this particular action, so turing it on/off requires passing a non-null/null pointer.

Windows actually has a flag to enable focus-follows-mouse ("active window tracking"), which can be enabled easily via the monstrous "SystemParametersInfo" Win32 API call. There are third-party programs to enable the flag, such as X-Mouse Controls, or you can perform the call directly using PowerShell.

The documentation isn't always super clear on how the pvParam argument is used, and some powershell snippets incorrectly pass a pointer to the value, rather than the value itself, when setting this particular flag. This ends up always being interpreted as true, i.e. they accidently work for enabling the flag, but not for disabling it again.

Below is a powershell snippet that performs the call correctly. It also includes proper error-checking, and I've tried to go for cleanliness rather than brevity, to also make it easier to add wrappers for other functionality of SystemParametersInfo, should you find some that interests you.

Note that issue #1 above is still present, but easily worked around by just using the magnifying glass (search) icon to the right of the start menu (shortcut key Window + S). A small price to pay for getting X-Mouse functionality.

Depending on which build of Windows 10 you are running, the menu path to access "Focus Follows Mouse" may be slightly different from some of the instructions in this thread. I was able to get to the proper menu with this sequence:

Using the method to achieve the sloppy mouse behavior, that I'm so accustomed to, from previous versions of windows and linux from the post. I do not experience issue #2 that you are having. Issue #1 that you and all will have when using this registry modification is not an issue. It does exactly as expected because you have changed the way focus is handled in windows with this modification. Using the windows key brings the mouse into the start menu not the search menu so it gets focus, not the search menu. So, if you wish to use search either click in the search bar or magnification icon (depending on your settings for its appearance) or use the Win+S key combo and it will do the right thing.

Do NOT click the app icon in the taskbar before trying to select a window. If you do, as soon as you move the mouse pointer above the taskbar, the windows will disappear. Just hover above the app icon until the windows appear, then you can move the pointer into the one you need.

Note: the Windows 10 "Scroll inactive windows when I hover over them" setting is a useful addition (see Start -> Settings -> Devices -> Mouse & Touchpad). This seems independent from Xmouse functionality and ON seems to be the default.

If you want the focus to follow the mouse in a computer with multiple monitors, the proposed solutions (Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse) are probably not enough or at least not the best option. I found quite frustrating the lost of focus while you are on the same screen. For example if the mouse cursor go slightly out of the window where you are typing, you suddenly loose the focus and another window is shown on top of the one you where working on.

To solve this problem the only solution that I found was to turn off the Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse feature and use AutoHotKey (it's a free and open-source software) to activate the focus on the window under the mouse cursor but only when the mouse moves from one screen to another.

Most important: I'd like to have the keyboard focus follow the window focus,and not require any special positioning of the pointer, so that I can just "Alt-Tab" around my windows and have the command window get the keyboard focus. All of the resources I've found so far relate to programmatic control of focus; I'm just trying to improve my user experience in an interactive session.

Finally, include setWMName "LG3D" in your startupHook. See here for a full xmonad.hs configuration which uses this (this is where I found the solution). If you have other Java apps that don't get focus as they should you can add them to the myFloatAS list.

I ran into this problem, running MATLAB2014a. I set up setWMName "LG3D" but still i couldn't get focus on my window. I had to click on the focused window to get the cursor, and sometimes the situation was even worse and I had to click on random places till i get my cursor back. This wouldn't happen on MATLAB2010. What worked for me was to use the native version of java as describe above.

I set my subject to a term I have never seen used previously. The idea of a similar term, keyboard focus, is that the input from the keyboard is sent to a single window. My term "pointer focus" is the determination of which window a mouse click will be sent. Typically you would expect the mouse click to be sent to the window over which the mouse pointer is positioned. However, what I have experienced with numerous non-Apple applications (MS Outlook, FireFox, iTerm2, for example), is that I need to first click in the window once to enable the next or subsequent clicks to be transmitted to that application. This is not how Linux X Window or Microsoft Windows works.

For example, I have Firefox up and running and my mouse clicks are arriving in that application. Then I see in Outlook a new email has arrived that I want to open. If I click once on the message in the inbox list, nothing happens. If I click on it a second time, the message opens.

And, so this goes on for a few months and I put up with it. Then I think I will just double click in the application and that should do what I want. But, no, that double click DOES transmit a double click to the application. In Outlook double clicking on a message in the inbox opens the message in a new window. So, in the case of double click, somehow sends that double click to the application over which my mouse pointer is located, without me having to first click once in the window.

I went through support. Their answer was that OS X was designed to work this way, but the double-click behavior was a flaw. The suggested providing feedback ( Product Feedback - Apple ), which I did. I also found this in the documentation: Cocoa Event Handling Guide :

Here is a good demo of the proper operation. Open Apple->About This Mac. Then also open System Preferences. Make sure the two windows are not overlapping. Click once on the System preferences window title bar. Now click once on the System Report button on About This Mac. Likewise go back to System Preferences and click on a icon like General. In both cases those single clicks take the action.

This is very useful to prevent a user from editing a field, while still being able to post the value. I realize this is a convenience method and that there are several workarounds, but I want to use this method.

The onfocus/blur method works ok to remove the cursor from a readonly field, but the browser does not automatically refocus on the next field, and you may lose focus altogether, which is not what the user usually expects. So, if this is required, you can use plain javascript to focus on the next field you want, but you have to specify the next field:

Where 'NextField' is the name of the field to goto. (Alternatively, you could provide some other means to locate the next field). Obviously, this is more involved if you want to navigate to some non-visible UI element, like a tab-panel, as you will need to arrange this as well.

Is there a way to either make all shortcuts operate based on where the focus is, instead of where the mouse pointer is, or else have macOS automatically move the mouse pointer to the display with the focused window when focus changes? There's no point in keyboard shortcuts that force me to use the mouse, anyway.

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