All Blender Windows should become active on mouse hover.
One of the key elements of speed when using Blender is that each little editor is like its own program and has its own shortcuts and you only need to have your mouse over the right area to do what you need to do.
When working with multiple main windows and the Render Result window, having to actually click on a window before you can use a keyboard shortcut gets annoying after a while.
Currently with my Render Result window active, I can move my mouse to the other windows on the other monitors and every Blender UI element that has a hover state is reacting to the mouse hovering over them. Every area with a scrollbar can be scrolled with my mouse wheel.
I'm asking that this mouse awareness in spite of not being the active window be expanded to allow keyboard shortcuts so that we can interact with all Blender windows as if they were one big virtual work surface even though it's multiple windows.
Rough logic explaination: IF the currently active window is ANY Blender window AND the mouse is hovering over any Editor in any Blender window THEN that editor will react to its editor-specific keyboard shortcuts.
9 Comments
in windows7/8/10 you can enable this for all windows, its very convenient and also helps a lot with blender multiple windows ... winaero.com/enable-xmouse-window-tracking-windows-10/ or use the winaero tweaker to enable it
I didn't know this, thank you ))
Unfortunately there's a full second delay before the window becomes active on my slow laptop and an almost 2 second delay on my very fast laptop.
then theres something wrong with your system or maybe the delay is set to 1 second .. use winaero tweaker , there you can finetune the settings
ok sorry guys i was too quick to answer , the windows 10 function really doesnt work on the blender main window if multiple blender windows are open.
therefor i coded a small autohotkey script which does the job.
with this the blender windows are activated automatically. its not a good script for every program because it also raises the window to the front , but since i use blender windows only in fullscreen mode and popout windows automatically hover over the main window it works very nice in this case.
download here
github.com/Ulf3000/activate_blender_window_under_cursor
like here
blenderartists.org/t/autohotkey-script-activate-blender-window-under-cursor/1339316
yeah that sounds great if they were to add this feature how will you use it personally i would use it in making architecture
On Mac its a standard. For example if you open preference and then the keymap tab, you expect the mouse wheel or trackpad to scroll when used, however Blender wants you to first click on the panel and then it will work. Yeah, a bit old style, its 2021 !
Yes, I have had this issue with Windows 10, where I have auto activate on hover, but only the Blender secondary windows auto activate, then you have to click the main window to activate.
+1 But not "window" I think, editors/spaces maybe? (different types of spaces inside one of Blender windows eg. 3D View, Image Editor, Outliner, etc.)
Currently in Windows OS you have to select Bledner window (click on it) to make it "active". Clicking on one of Blener windows not make others active so if window A is active your hotkeys do something in it, but same hotkeys do absolutely nothing in window B if you not click on it (not make it active).
Only things that work for not active windows in Windows OS is mouse actions LMB/RMB/Mouse Wheel/Mouse 4-5 ( Interesting fact is that mouse wheel do something in not active window without making it active). If you did not noticed, mouse/hotkeys work in this way not only for Blender but for any Windows OS application window - mouse wheel can scroll but hotkeys not work.... so I am not sure that in case of multiple Bledner windows it will depend on Blender only (at least in Windows OS).