I’m mainly a Linux user but occasionally use Kicad on macOS - it’s nice to design on whatever machine has the biggest screen and fastest graphics. (I’m getting my excuse in early for lack of detailed platform knowledge, and not having tested this for other recent Kicad and macOS versions!)
There’s an option “Focus follows mouse between schematic and PCB editors” in the Kicad settings which I’m sure used to work, but when I switched it on in Kicad 9.0.2 on macOS 15.5, focus stayed stubbornly in the schematic window when I moved to the PCB window, and vice versa. Does this work for anyone else - i.e. is it my Mac which is somehow strangely configured - or have recent Kicad or macOS changes broken it?
The main reason I care about this option is that pinch-to-zoom works in non-focused windows in native Mac applications, and Kicad windows can be scrolled without being focused, but insist on being focused to be able to zoom, so when I move the pointer and try to casually zoom, it always fails. I assume this is a difficulty with wxwidgets on macOS rather than directly a Kicad bug though.
I would blame macOS more than wxWidgets but probably both. macOS has historically been quirky when it comes to focus and things break because apple doesn’t care about apps that aren’t their own these apps (if that’s even true, hah)
Apple is notorious for insisting that the users of their products MUST use them the way Apple thinks computer user interfaces should work, and fighting attempts to do anything else. Focus-follows-mouse has historically been one of those things, like making scrolling work backward compared to every other platform.
Historically, scrolling on macOS worked exactly the same as on Windows - scrolling down moved the “elevator box” down, which moved the page up. It was only after touch-screen devices became popular that Apple reversed the default scroll direction. And, it’s a user-settable preference - I have mine set so that a downward scroll moves the window up.
Thanks for calling this to my attention! I have clumsily stumbled on this before…my brain thinks that my laptop knows what I am looking at. I just now clicked on that option but will not try it until this weekend when this personal laptop gets the external monitor back from my employer’s computer.
Ha, no defence of Apple’s behaviour with the platform from me - I’m just an occasional refugee there. But I was sufficiently frustrated with the lack of point-to-focus in the rest of macOS (apart from Kicad) that I took a shot at hacking together my own band-aid: https://github.com/arachsys/typetofocus makes macOS a bit less painful for me but ymmv.
This only ‘fixes’ focus for typing-heavy workflows, so with Kicad and pinch-to-zoom in particular, the built-in feature would work much better.
Hmm, the code is only trying to do a standard raise of the frame when moving back and forth rather than any tricky focus-without-raise workarounds using undocumented APIs like I use:
That feels less likely to break randomly because of changes to macOS. Strange. I wonder if it’s not even receiving the right events to act upon any more - perhaps now filtered out by the OS with the excuse of security?