Betalogue

Here’s another example of click-through behaviour in Mac OS X that gets in the way of what you’re trying to do instead of being useful.

As you know, in Mac OS X if you hold the command key down while clicking on a background window’s title bar, you can move that window without bringing it to the foreground. Cmd-clicking and dragging on a background window doesn’t change the focus, which stays on your current window.

Unfortunately, command-clicking also has another meaning when you use it on the part of the window’s title bar that displays the name of the window, i.e. the center part. Command-clicking on the window title shows a pop-up menu with the path leading to the actual location of the corresponding file.

It’s handy, but it’s something that I am not likely to want to use in a background window. In most cases, command-clicking and dragging on a background window is used to move the window. Yet if you command-click on the center part of the title bar of a background window, it causes Mac OS X to display the pop-up menu with the path for that background window. I don’t think this is appropriate. I think the default behaviour should be to deactivate this pop-up menu feature for background windows and to use command-clicking and dragging anywhere on a background window’s title bar to move the background window around.

It’s a small detail, but it’s an annoyance.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Friday, July 4th, 2003 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.