Please disable click-through in MacOS

Plex Labs
1

Clicking on the plexamp window, in addition to bringing it to the foreground, passes the click action through. I find this pretty frustrating – an application like Plexamp, where clicking on many parts of the UI may abruptly change the currently playing track, should make it a little harder to accidentally change what’s playing. (especially because the UI is minimal and doesn’t have innocuous places to click on.)

I don’t actually know how to do this, but it appears to be possible by overriding the acceptsFirstMouse instance method for a particular view/control.

2

It’s an acceptFirstMouse option in Electron, but I’m not sure I agree it should be disabled :thinking: It seems pretty standard for macOS apps, although even Apple isn’t 100% consistent about it.

3

Is there a way to determine whether the window was obscured prior to its refocus? I think disabling click-through would be most useful if the Plexamp window was partially/mostly obscured.

4

IMO that would be even more confusing :laughing: “dammit, why did that click work? oh right the window was only 49% obscured”

Personally, I learn the “dead areas” in the app and click there (e.g. “titlebar” and selected tab item).

5

I can’t find any current Official Guidelines™ to this behavior, but there’s a quote with what they used to be here: macos - Mac: clicking between programs requires 2 clicks - Stack Overflow

Avoid providing click-through for an item or action whose result might be dangerous or undesirable. Specifically, avoid enabling click-through for an item that:

  • Performs a potentially harmful action that users can’t cancel (for example, the Delete button in Mail).
  • Performs an action that is difficult or impossible to cancel (such as the Send button in Mail)
  • Dismisses a dialog without telling the user what action was taken (for example, the Save button in a Save dialog that overwrites an existing file and automatically dismisses the dialog)
  • Removes the user from the current context (for example, selecting a new item in a Finder column that changes the target of the Finder window).

IMO changing the current playing track clearly falls into this category… while it’s not as severe as deleting something or sending an email, it does change context quite strongly.

Can it be configurable?? That seems pretty amazing, honestly.

6

Changing the behavior based on how obscured the window is sounds a bit crazy-making to me. Consistency seems better here… :crazy_face:

7

It’s possible that what I actually want is an option to require double-clicking to change the currently playing track. Even if Plexamp is in the foreground, I don’t particularly like having the track changed with a single click. I may be the only person who wants it this way, but I basically never want these things to happen with a single click:

  1. Calling someone on the phone.
  2. Changing the currently playing track.

:joy:

8

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