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I want the focus to follow the mouse pointer for ergonomic reasons, how do I enable this on MacOS Sequoia?

I want the focus to follow the mouse pointer for ergonomic reasons, how do I enable this on MacOS Sequoia? For example, I have 4 terminal windows open, some compiler process in one, a ready shell prompt in another, an open vi session in another for example. Currently I have to (1) move mouse over the window and click before I can interact with the window. Other operating systems allow this focus to be automatic by simply sliding the mouse cursor over the window - thereby reducing repetitive stress / over use injuries etc. I am being verbose because every other question on this subject seems to get bad results and reddit like actually you should instead be smarter and do things the Mac way etc...


Anyone have any ideas? I thought it was possible with terminal in the old days with maybe a command line preference setting but I don't see that answer here on the official Apple communicates. I am running Sequoia.


If possible for just a single application like Terminal.app, that would be a big help but ideally I'd like it to work with my editor as well which might be in it's own window and not running inside a Terminal application.


I am able to do this on Windows 11 and on various window managers on Linux like Sway and GNOME.


Anyone have any ideas?


Posted on Nov 15, 2024 7:06 AM

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Nov 15, 2024 7:24 AM in response to subaqua

I asked Siri on my new M4 with Apple Intelligence and could not find this answer but grok was able to find me a solution for Terminal.app and it works on MacOS Sequoia 15.1 . To enable Focus Follows Mouse for Terminal.app I did the following:


defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES


Then restart Terminal.app.


To undo this, change the YES to NO as in:


defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string NO


This solution worked for me. I thought for sure Siri would have been able to point me to the solution but it was unable to.



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I want the focus to follow the mouse pointer for ergonomic reasons, how do I enable this on MacOS Sequoia?

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