Can I mouse-over (not click) a window to 'activate' the window

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Right chaps,

way back in a career a long time ago I used to do CAD/CAM on a Sun Solaris which was using some variant of Unix. One of the things i used to love about it was that when I placed the mouse over a window, it would 'activate' the window and I could type, click buttons or whatever straight away. ie I wouldn't have to mouse-over, click in the window to activate and then do whatever.

I have just moved over from Windows and whilst I am very happy with OS X so far, its just one thing that I would really like to be able to do, especially as i switch often between IM chat windows and Firefox windows. ie I have to click on Firefox to activate the window, then click a link to follow it, or type in a text box...

Can this be done in OS X, if so, what am I missing because I have hunted high and low on the net, and on the system prefs to get this to work.

Any help gratefully received.

cheers

GW
 
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Ah, good old Auto Raise. Something that once you get used to you really miss it. However i've long since gotten used to the click in window to bring to front and it's been years since I've done anything on a system that supports AR. That was an X thing and I used to configure it for every workstation I put hands on to do it.

Unfortunately with Mac OS X you are probably going to need to get used to click-to-raise as I don't think anyone's written functionality like that into the OS. I don't even know if that can be configured with Apple's own X implementation.
 
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Hmmm, shame. Guess I'll just have to live with it then.

cheers.
 
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You can kind of do a mouse-over, but you have to have a mighty mouse. When you squeeze the sides the expose will shrink all of the windows and you can mouse-over it and let go of the sides and it will let you enter that window. I know it's not exactly what you were looking for, but that's the closest you will get.
 
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Yeah, the mighty mouse squeezing is pretty good. Something else that is fast (and doesn't require any clicking) is just hitting Command + Tab, sorta like the Alt + Tab (I think) in windows.

If you do it really fast, it'll just switch to the next app (if your flicking between two apps).

- Jordan
 
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Yeah, the mighty mouse squeezing is pretty good. Something else that is fast (and doesn't require any clicking) is just hitting Command + Tab, sorta like the Alt + Tab (I think) in windows.

If you do it really fast, it'll just switch to the next app (if your flicking between two apps).

- Jordan

to switch between windows of the same application, press cmd+` (ok i think this is the default key, it's the key above tab, it also has tilde ~, I did reset mine because I have a slightly different layout, but I think it is in fact `)
 
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to switch between windows of the same application, press cmd+` (ok i think this is the default key, it's the key above tab, it also has tilde ~, I did reset mine because I have a slightly different layout, but I think it is in fact `)

thank you SO MUCH for this. i use CMD+Tab ALLLLLL the time. But i always got frustrated when i was trying to utilize two different browser windows.

:D:D:D:D:D
 

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