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 …
I don’t know if there’s a Vista version of this yet, but for XP MS released some tools for pimping the UI:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
- TweakUI sets UI parameters such as FFM, etc.
- Virtual Desktop Manager fixes the “single-workspace” problem.
[lang_en]The XP PowerToys — as the name suggests — are XP only. Also I would believe that they also only use
SystemParametersInfoto set FFM.[/lang_en][lang_de]Die XP PowerToys sind — wie der Name schon andeutet nur für XP. Ausserdem bezweifle ich, dass sie was anderes alsSystemParametersInfoverwenden.[/lang_de]No luck there really, visual studio autoraises anyways
Yep, I’ve discovered it myself some time ago, it’s very unfortunate. This is probably the only place on the net that covers this problem, so if anybody knows anything about the reasons/workarounds – please put it in the comment!
PS. If somebody knows a right place to ask about it to VS devs – please leave a message.
I’ve noticed that Visual Studio only seems to auto-raise when a “document” has focus in VS. If you select a Find Results window or the Solution Explorer in VS, then the auto-raise doesn’t occur.