MacOS – How to prevent Messages from opening up a new chat window

macosmessages

When I am working on something else on my iMac, I tend to get a lot of messages via the Messages app. For some reason, when I click once on the messages app window, it does not get focus right away: Therefore, I usually double-click (Perhaps its a habit from MS Windows). When you double click inside a chat area, it opens up that specific chat conversation into a new chat window – which is extremely annoying (IMHO).

Is it possible to turn off the feature of opening that chat conversation in a new window?

I am running 10.8.2 and Messages version 7.0.1 (3314).

EDIT: So some further testing – This happens when:

  1. A different chat session is selected
  2. Messages does NOT have focus
  3. I click into a different chat session inside of my Messages window
    • this requires two clicks, 1 click to gain focus, 1 click to change chat windows.

All I am looking to do is disable the chat session from opening up in a new, independent window.

Best Answer

Unfortunately this is something that isn't possible. As you are aware, the only control we have over any double-clicking in the "Double-Click Speed" in Mouse preferences. Any changes here would be undesirable as it would affect the entire system and your goal is just the Messages app.

There is a convenient keyboard shortcut, Command + W, to close the new window that comes up, so at least you don't have to go over and manually close the window.

I suppose this is a feature request that doesn't come up very often but you could at least do what you can and fill out a feature request.

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