MacOS – How to disable the Option+click hiding behaviour

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In Mac OS X Mountain Lion at least, if you Option+click ( Alt+click ) on another a window of another app, this will make the other application to gain focus, and the current app to be hidden as if you'd pressed Command+H.

Is there any way to disable this behaviour? Perhaps with some defaults write like command entered in a terminal?

I'd like to use Option+click for some different behaviour (moving windows by Option+clicking anywhere on them, using a third-party tool, Zoom2), and having Option+click trigger the hiding behaviour instead is very inconvenient.

Best Answer

One option would be to remap Option+Left Click to something else using KeyRemap4MacBook. It might not have exactly what you want, but I think it's not hard to add new shortcuts (or ask the author to add them for you). One option that I saw was Option+Left Click -> Middle Click. You could then (assumedly) set middle click to do what you want in Zoom2, and retain the Option+Click shortcut.

Of course, if you do this, it will change Option+Click everywhere, even if you aren't clicking on another window.

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MacOS – How to focus on MacVim in terminal using keyboard shortcut

See this question for different ways to assign shortcuts to opening applications.

When I tried using Alfred to assign a keyboard shortcut for MacVim, pressing the shortcut did not always open a new window. You could try using a script like this though:

tell application "MacVim"
    reopen -- open a new default window if there are no open windows
    activate -- make frontmost
end tell

Or try just using activate app "MacVim" or adding different arguments to open -a MacVim.

MacOS – Bring all windows of active application to top

You can assign a keyboard shortcut to the "Bring All to Front" menu item from System Preferences:

The activate AppleScript command also raises all windows:

activate application (path to frontmost application as text)

If you are assigning keyboard shortcuts to opening applications, you can use scripts like this:

tell application "TextEdit"
    reopen
    activate
end tell

reopen opens a new default window if there are no open "default" windows, like a text editor window in TextEdit. If all default windows are minimized, reopen unminimizes one of them.

It is also possible to use AppleScript to click the "Bring All to Front" menu item:

tell application "System Events" to tell (process 1 where frontmost is true)
    click menu item "Bring All to Front" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Window" of menu bar 1
end tell

Best Answer

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