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Having GIMP Troubles on Mac OS X? Try This.
If, like me, you’ve installed GIMP for Mac OS X that runs in X11, you may have experienced some very strange behavior. By default, if you click on another window in Mac OS X it merely activates that window but doesn’t pass the click to the control you clicked on. This behavior is called “click-through” – the ability to click on something in a window that’s not active to both activate the window and click on the item. Linux and Windows both work this way, by default. Like many things, OS X breaks the mold and goes a different route.
However, with an app like GIMP where it uses multiple windows to do things, this is completely unacceptable behavior. I would have to click twice to activate a tool. And then I’d try to start drawing, but a click and drag won’t even activate the window. So, I’d have to click again and then I could click and drag to draw. It was a complete nightmare.
Luckily, there is a solution. Click-through can be enabled for X11.
$ defaults write org.x.X11 wm_click_through -bool true
Execute the above command from an xterm and restart X11. Now the clicking will behave as you expect.
Now I just have to figure out how to do this for other apps.
Posted by Shane on November 11, 2008 6:29 PM | Permalink
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