joelpurra/xmouse-controls

Microsoft Windows utility to manage the active window tracking/raising settings. This is known as x-mouse behavior or focus follows mouse on Unix and Linux systems.

X-Mouse Controls

Microsoft Windows utility to manage the active window tracking/raising settings. This is known as x-mouse behavior or focus follows mouse on Unix and Linux systems.

• Project site with downloads
• Source code on github
• Chocolatey package: choco install xmouse-controls

Screenshot of the main window, running on Windows 10.

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X-Mouse Controls Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 Joel Purra. Released under GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPL-3.0). Your donations are appreciated!

xmouse-controls's Issues

Add an exclude windows list

I met the same problem as #8
I suggest you can add an exclude windows list, the specific windows in the exclude windows list will not autoraise(autofocus).
Then #8 can also be solved.

Settings synchronized when using a Microsoft Account on multiple machines

(Original title: This is not an issue...) ...but more of an interesting observation. The behaviour is being synched between Windows 10 machines if you are logged in with your Microsoft account.

Wish: disable raise-on-click

Would it be possible to add an option to disable the raising of a window by a mouse click inside window?

On X, I've always been able to click on controls inside a window without raising it. IOW, raise only when clicking the window banner/border.

[Even without disabling raise-on-click, I think I could have justified using my HSA Visa card instead of my "normal" one to make a donation — because windows default behavior was going to kill me.]

would it make sense to provide xmouse via winget, in addition to choco?

it seems they also have packaging request option for github hosted projects but I'm no expert on packaging, just a humble winget user.

When typing in Chinese pinyin, the little candidate window steals focus.

Hi,

I just tried this tool and loved it. No more registry hacks. On Windows 10 the sidebar happily works.

But the little problem is, as in the title, when I type in Chinese, there will be a 'candidate window' pop up near my cursor to show possible characters that corresponds to the pinyin I just typed. This window steals focus if the mouse cursor is over it and I lost what I have typed immediately.

I'd like to explain it a bit more if needed, since it seems I can't upload a screenshot to show what I mean.

Package manager publishing?

I would love it if there were a package in Chocolatey (or any other Windows package manager) for X-Mouse Controls.

If you have no objection, I'd be willing to figure out how to create and publish one. If I do so, would you want to be listed as a maintainer? I assume the only maintenance would be an update to the package to reflect new versions of the software itself, which I can do myself if you have a way for me to subscribe to release updates. (It looks like updates are currently only listed on your website, so I can't subscribe to GitHub notifications or similar.)

P.S. Thanks for writing X-Mouse Controls; I've found it very useful! One could even say I've grown addicted; I don't install it on Windows accounts I share with my family, and am occasionally caught off-guard by not having it.

Behavior appears to have changed with a recent Windows update

I've been using xmouse-controls to emulate X "focus follows mouse" on Windows 10, i.e., activating windows without raising them. Recently, however, windows are always raised when they are activated, whether or not the "raise window" checkbox is selected in xmouse-controls.

I don't know if this is an issue with my system or if it's due to a recent change in Windows; and if it's the latter, I don't know whether or not it's fixable. I was recently updated to version 21H1 (OS build 19043.1110, experience pack 120.2212.3920.0), so if anyone else has this issue, hopefully they will see this issue and can give another data point on whether an update is the culprit.

Is is possible to pause the app if a file is getting deleted for example

When deleting a file for example and you hover past another window the delete box confirm window gets sent to the back if that option is enabled.

Is it possible to auto-pause the app when something like this happens? Maybe there are too many situations where a similar situation occurs like the properties window.

Mouse pointer jumping on focus

For a while I have had an issue with my mouse jumping when a window came to the fore. I don't know (can't remember) when it started, but eventually tracked it down to X-Mouse Controls' "Activate window tracking". I have been using X-Mouse Controls for well over 2 years and only noticed this issue (or became increasingly bothered by it) about 2 months ago.

I'll try and describe the issue as well as I can and as completely as I can.

I would like windows to move to the fore when I hover my mouse over them. My typical raise time is 750 ms, as I don't want a stray mouse movement to shift focus too quickly. This has become more of an issue with high-res screens and the increasingly smaller window frame grabbing area in Win10. If I'm trying to get my mouse onto the 1px grab for resizing a window and I drift a little off, I don't want the focus to jump too quickly to the window behind. So, in practice, I might have several apps/windows open and as I move my mouse around the screen, after a slight delay, I'd like the "pointed at" app to have focus, and move to the front. This, generally works quite well.

If Properties is correct, I am running X-Mouse-Controls version 1.1.0.0

Problems arise when I click on apps in the taskbar. Currently, I have Firefox, MobaXterm, 3 bash terminals, 5 file explorer windows, Adobe Acrobat and Steam. The results are random. Sometimes when I click an app my mouse jumps from where it was to the center of the, now forwarded, window. Most of the time the mouse pointer stays exactly where it was on the taskbar.

If I use either the Task Switcher (Alt+Tab) or Task View (Win+Tab) to switch applications, the mouse pointer will always jump from its current location to the center of the now fore window.

My total desire would be the the mouse always remains where I left it. But, I guess I can deal with the Task Switcher/Task View results, it's the random results which clicking on apps on the Taskbar which really bugs me. Sometimes I may need to click on several of these in a row, in order to find the one I actually need. It's become infuriating to have to drag my mouse back to the taskbar in order to click on the next window.

Would it be possible to add a checkbox so that when you switch apps with either a click or keystroke it won't move the mouse pointer to the center of the newly foregrounded app?

website for downloads unreachable

When I try to go to https://joelpurra.com/, firefox is unable to load the site.

the program stops functioning after sleep

all functionality is suspended after the pc is wake up (on 2 pcs)

the symbol is not responding and only ending (from task manager) and restarting the app works.

the icon:

win 10:

Dual target .net-3.5 and .net-4.0

On a fresh Windows 10 install, trying to run xmouse-controls shows this:

It is possible to build the utility in such a way that Windows is willing to use .net-4.0 to run it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20865375 . Since this is a simple utility, it would be nice if it listed both SKUs so that it would just work out of the box everywhere without requiring installation of .net-3.5.

I tested the app.config method and it works as long as you have the .config file next to the executable. I will make a PR soon and may investigate if I can do this with the embedded manifest somehow instead of only in the external .config file.

Windows 11

Trouble with Windows 11 and the task bar. Can't choose multiple windows if it's under an icon.

Allow app window to have focus for specific apps only

Hello,

I would like a particular app to have focus when my mouse moves over it, however I only want it to work for a specific application.

Is this possible as a feature enhancement?

Thank you!

Maybe at a keyboard shortcut to toggle between on/off

On Windows 10, some notifications lose focus when you hover over them.

Window tracking

On my machine where I use Visual Studio 2010 and Command Prompts all the time Windows often goes back to Click-to-focus. It would be nice if your program was able to run hidden and keep window tracking on.

Add minimize button

Requesting to have minimize button on the window. I use xmouse-controls on a shared computer account on a slow computer and reopening the program in order to change back to normal settings for the next user takes quite some time.

Breaks context menu in Windows 10

When window tracking is enabled and an icon is right clicked in the task bar, the context menu immediately disappears.

A temporary fix is adding a delay onto the window switch.

Manually raising window without interacting with content

I'm guessing this is not possible without actually capturing mouse/keyboard events (and therefore not in scope for this project), but I thought I'd ask anyway: is it possible to manually raise a window without needing to click on it? I've found that most Windows apps have very few places to click that don't change something (e.g. pausing a video, moving the mouse cursor & selection, etc) in the state of the app itself. It would be really nice if I could raise the currently-focused window using a keyboard shortcut or something without any risk of changing the app state.

Can we integrate better with keyboard-driven window switching?

First, a sidenote: Just found this program, and it's great! Thank you for putting it out here and opening the source!

On to the question:

Would you be open to adding a hook to temporarily (until next mouse movement) disable the focus-follows-mouse features upon certain key combinations?

Motivation:

Every Windows focus-follows-mouse solution I've tried has a problem where if you use Alt+Tab or Ctrl+Tab or otherwise switch window focus using keyboard shortcuts, immediately after, the window under the mouse steals focus again (made worse by Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Tab repositioning the mouse cursor).

X window managers I've used on Linux don't have this problem: you can mix and match the keyboard and mouse Window focus switching workflows without issue.

I find that when I'm doing a very keyboard-driven things between a couple frequently switched windows I prefer Alt+Tab to moving my hand all the way to the mouse, but otherwise prefer using the focus-follows-mouse feature.

Implementation thoughts:

We could have two event handlers:

1. Disable the focus-follow-mouse features. Register the second event listener (if it's not better to just register the second one permanently?)

2. Re-enable the focus-follow-mouse features that were previously enabled.

The first one can be hooked to a user-modifiable list of key stroke combinations, with the default value of the list being Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Tab.

I don't know if this forces you to re-architect anything or just adds more complexity than you want in this project - I haven't yet looked at your code - but if you're open to going that route I'd be happy to make an attempt at a pull request for it.

Web site download link is for debug build

On the X-Mouse Controls web site, the "Download latest version" button links to https://files.joelpurra.com/projects/x-mouse-controls/2018-10-06T1730Z/x-mouse_controls_2018-10-06T1730Z_debug.zip

(You can download the release build by scrolling down the page and clicking the v1.1.0.0 download link.)

Feature request: Exclude windows elements and pop up windows?

Hi, would it be possible to exclude windows elements and pop up windows from the xmouse behavior?
Thanks

Are there any keyboard shortcuts to enable/disable it?

Hi,

First of all, thanks for the great software!

Are there any keyboard shortcuts to enable/disable mouse active window tracking?

can't connect download address

can't connect download address.https://files.joelpurra.com/projects/x-mouse-controls/2018-10-06T1730Z/x-mouse_controls_2018-10-06T1730Z_release.zip
Don't know why.

Windows 7 Excel 2016 problem

This following thing didn't work b4 I tried the xmouse, and it isn't working now. It is about scrolling not being possible inside the Pivot Table Fields on Windows 7 64bit/Excel 2016 64 bit system. Can't scroll the pivot table fields, hovering over it is not enough. Need to click inside the pivot table sections window first, to be able to scroll it. I know for sure scrolling the Pivot Table Fields works just by hovering over it on Windows 10 / Office 2007 combination, no xmouse used there.

Please release xmouse-controls as a plain old Zip file

It would be great if you could please release xmouse-controls as a plain old Zip file. That way, users wouldn't need to install a .7z archive extraction utility in order to run it.

I'm on broadband Internet, so I'm unconcerned about the size of the download.

P.S. Thank you very much for writing and open-sourcing xmouse-controls! It works as promised.

Add Command-Line Options

This program works great. The only thing I would want is the ability to specify the parameters on the command-line. The program should just execute the requested action and then terminate. The GUI should only come up if no parameters are specified on the command-line.