I love sloppy focus in a windowing environment. It makes me happy. I shouldn't have to click on a window and bring it to the foreground for it to have focus and be able to accept input. I should just be able to slide the mouse over the window, and as long as it doesn't exit that window and hit another one, the window I rolled over should get focus.
I am so used to this behavior after 10 years of desktop Linux usage that I'm always thinking it works the same way in Windows. But I was wrong—you have to click windows before they accept focus.
Except I'm wrong again. You can have sloppy focus in Windows. I just modified Vista to have sloppy focus!
In Regedit, set the 0x1 bit (thanks to Sam for the clarification):
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask
In my case, the value was set to 9E 3E 07 80 12 00 00 00. This value is little-endian, which means the least-significant-bit is first. So in hex, this is 0x0000001280073E9E. Adding 0x1, we get 0x0000001280073E9F. Reverse the bits and you get the new value: 9F 3E 07 80 12 00 00 00.
It's simpler to just increment the first bit in the sequence, but this is so you really understand what is going on.
Log off (no need to reboot) and log back in. You now have sloppy focus. This works in Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista.
Oh good -- you didn't just trick me into ejecting my CPU or something. I don't think I've used sloppy focus before, I think I'll like it.
Your explanation is misleading: the bit needs to be set, not incremented. You must not affect any other bits of the mask while setting the sloppy focus bit.
As a sidenote, forcing me to install a Java plugin just so I can leave a comment on this blog makes me want to torture small animals.
Thanks for clarifying the bit issue. And the java, well, I got sick of comment spam. Would you prefer an unreadable CAPTCHA instead? I wouldn't. Plus the time it takes to generate the hash means the commenter needs to take a little time to read through what they're writing.
is this able to only be under one user or the whole system. other users probably would freak out. i haven't used the regestery enough to know these things.
It goes under the Current User section, so it won't apply to anyone else, just the user that makes the change.
Well this worked, kinda!
Now focus follows the mouse, but it doesn't make the windows to jump out in front.. Meaning i have to hover the mouse over a program to be able to write in it..
Meaning, this is not sloppy focus, it is FocusFollowsMouse..
Not like the linux sloppy focus where i can scroll in a window that is not active, and still keep focus on a window so i can type there!
Too bad
[...] Windows 95 and it appears it still works. You can have crude ’sloppy focus’ on Windows. Just hex-edit your UserPreferencesMask in the Registry (Half of the times that I’m doing anything remotely interesting on Windows, I [...]
@Tomas:
Well, according to Wikipedia and this informative page, this is sloppy focus. If you move out of some window and over to your desktop background, you don't lose input focus of said window.
But it does not allow you to scroll in an inactive window, which is a killer feature indeed. I've just finished a blogpost on this subject and some other things in which X11 (and its window managers) positively stack up against Windows and OS X.
Great. It works on Windows7.
This is also a feature of TweakUI (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx) released by MS for WinXP. Mouse -> X-Mouse -> Activation Follows Mouse achieves this. It also has a setting for auto-raising the window, which is the feature your are missing with the reg tweak
This is almost awesome. Like the previous poster said, this is FocusFollowsMouse. Also I found that in windows 7 this breaks the Windows Key-Arrow shortcuts for Aero Snap: the focus after a aero snap will be whatever window/desktop the cursor is over and not whatever window you are in the process of trying to move.