[Solved] Suppress window switching caused by mouse movements

[datlee]

Having cut my teeth for decades on MS Word, OO takes some getting used to. One of the annoyances it presents is that when the mouse happens to (usually accidentally) pass into another OO window, that immediately becomes the focus window. I don't know of any other application that does that. Is there any way to set Not-Doing-That as a default? Thanks.

[MrProgrammer]

One of the annoyances it presents is that when the mouse happens to (usually accidentally) pass into another OO window, that immediately becomes the focus window.

That doesn't happen for me, unless I accidentally perform a scroll operation in the other window. I can move the mouse in the other window and it doesn't receive the focus as long as I'm careful not to scroll in there. Personally I don't experience the problem because I keep my windows maximized, so there is no other OpenOffice window on the screen.

Can you reproduce the problem if you don't scroll, for example, by keeping your fingers on the side of the mouse, not on its top surface? It seems reasonable to give the window the focus if it is scrolled, though I realize that this is not how native Apple applications behave. The OpenOffice user interface is done with really old technology (the Carbon API) that Apple deprecated a decade or more ago. I doubt if the OpenOffice user interface API going to change. All of Apple's applications now use the Cocoa API. You can read about those APIs on the web.

There are several user interface behaviors that will seem strange in OpenOffice. For example when editing words in a spreadsheet cell you press ⌘ and left right arrow to move from one word to the next, not ⌥. And you use fn to move to the start or end of the cell, not ⌘. You can't press and hold a key to get accented letters. This is just the way OpenOffice works. You either get used to it, or you use Apple's iWork suite.

[Hagar Delest]

Moving to the Mac OS forum.
I tried on my Windows 10 machine and when I scroll with the mouse, the text moves for the window where the mouse is (having 2 documents open, one window partly covering the other). However, if I type something, even if the mouse is above the background window, the text is entered in the active window, at foreground.
It may be an option of your desktop manager.

[datlee]

Thanks very much for the informative reply. Wouldn't you know, after several months of this, I suddenly can't duplicate it(!). The only change was a reboot of my machine and thus an exit from OO, which (horrors) hadn't been done in several months. It may be that OO stops playing well under such circumstances. Now, even scrolling in a non-focus window doesn't bring it forward, at least not immediately.
Thanks again for taking the trouble to help out.