keyboard strokes and mouse clicks to background

March 30, 2005 9:45 AM

Is there a program that will send keyboard strokes and mouse clicks to a program that is in the background?

For example, lets say i have MS word open and fire fox open. I have firefox open in the foreground and ms word in the background either just under firefox or minimized. Is there a program that will allow me to keep firefox in the foreground but type stuff and have them appear in ms word? I need a program to send keyboard and mouse to a specific program that might not necessarily be the program in the foreground.

posted by EvilKenji to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Hmm... It's easy to hook they keyboard (and probably the mouse) using the windows API, and probably not that hard to send fake windows messages to the window of your choice.

But I doubt someone has already written this and packaged it in an easy to use shell.

Also, newer versions of windows (and some utilities) will notify the user if you try to do this as a sort of anti-spyware protection.
posted by delmoi at 10:24 AM on March 30, 2005

You might want to look into Point-to-Focus software. X Windows on Linux has this option, where pointing to the window allows you to interact with it, but doesn't automatically bring it to the top of the visual "stack" of windows. It's something I really love about X Windows, and I believe there are tools that add this to regular Windows, perhaps in one of the PowerToys packages.

If anyone knows of something similar for OS X, I'd love to hear about it.
posted by odinsdream at 10:35 AM on March 30, 2005

Yep, TweakUI in Windows Power Toys will do this (for Windows, of course). Enable "focus follows mouse", and focus will go to the window the mouse is over, without having to bring it to front. Some applications won't work as expected, though -- I've found a few that bring themselves to front as soon as they get focus.

(Oddly enough, the "focus follows mouse" option in TweakUI turns on what the X world calls "sloppy focus", in that an application doesn't lose focus when the mouse exits its window, only when the mouse enters another application's window.)

This seems to be the best you can get in OS X.
posted by mendel at 11:19 AM on March 30, 2005

True X-Mouse can also do this. It enables X-11 style mouse behavior is MS-Windows, and includes select-is-copy and middle-button-to-paste.
posted by orthogonality at 11:52 AM on March 30, 2005

hmm i am definitly going to try out x-mouse and the tweakUI stuff. Are there any programs out there that can send mouse and keybaord info to a background program while still allowing you to use mouse/keyboard for a program in the foreground?
posted by EvilKenji at 12:11 PM on March 30, 2005

This seems to be the best you can get in OS X.

Not true! Give this a try.
posted by mr_roboto at 2:25 PM on March 30, 2005

$40?! Come on... Exposé already does this when it spreads out the windows and lets you point at them, highlighting each one as the mouse glides over it, there has to be an easy hack to achieve focus-follows-mouse without shelling out money for it.
posted by odinsdream at 7:51 PM on March 30, 2005

PowerPro does that and a whole lot more (macros, event-based firing, etc) but has an absolutely terrible setup interface. Awful.

There are a slew of programs that will let you set a window to be 'always on top' so if you wanted firefox on top of word, but still type in word, you could set firefox to be 'always on top' and activate word, and as long as word is not also 'always on top' it will remain behind firefox while you type.

Deskpins is one such piece of software. PowerPro will do it too, but if you don't want/need its other features, it's probably best to use something less gross and confusing.
posted by ThePants at 9:22 AM on March 31, 2005