The home for all things macOS on LW.
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That's the intented behaviour in mac os. You select the window, then you can interact with it. That way there's no more trying to select a window, then you accidentally delete all your lifes work or something.
This stems from Mac OS being designed for you to just pile windows on top of each other. If you're constantly selecting different windows you'd have yo be careful where you click.
It's normal macOS behavior, programs usually ignore the first click that activates a window for UI actions unless it's something easily undoable (such as opening a dropdown menu). This means you don't first have to look for a free spot on the window if you want to focus it. (That's my interpretation of the reason behind it at least.)
I don't know if you can disable it. You can use the media control keys though, or ⌘` and then click which might be more comfortable than clicking twice.
⌘` and then click
that's what I was looking for, thanks
Or cmd-tab if you're coming from a different app. Also, when you're in cmd-tab mode you can do things like cmd-Q on the currently selected app to quit it. There's a lot of deep little hidden tricks in the GUI. Just takes a while to figure them out and become a power user. I also recommend if you have a multi-button mouse to bind some of the buttons to Show Desktop and Show All Windows (under the Desktop and Dock "Shortcuts" button at the very bottom).