Using Alt-Tab moves mouse to centre of newly focused window

Question

I'm getting used to Linux way of giving focus to a window just by hovering over it with the mouse. I've found it's possible to get the same effect in Windows by changing a byte in

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask 

(default for me was 9e 1e 07 80 12, and I switched the 9e to 9f) and I'm quite happy with that.

Now here is the thing, when I activate the mouse-over focus I also get another effect : the mouse is moved automatically to the center of the newly focused window when I use Alt+Tab. The mouse also gets moved to the taskbar if I open the windows menu using the Win key. I really hate having my mouse moved for me and would like do disable this behavior but it seems to be linked to the mouse-over focus.

Has any one else experienced this problem ? I found a lot of tutorials explaining how to get the focus follow the mouse by changing this registry key but no one seems to be bothered by the mouse moving by itself.

Answer 1

I achieved this effect by following the first part of this guide, without manually modifying any registry values, and the mouse only moves where I move it.

The steps are:

• Go to Control Panel
• Go to Ease of Access Center
• Go to Make the mouse easier to use
• Finally, check the box labeled Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse

There are two potential annoyances about this. Firstly, the delay is slightly longer than I would like if I were going to use this setting. This can be adjusted by changing the value of HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\ActiveWndTrkTimeout to the number of milliseconds for the delay, optionally setting the value to decimal for easy reading.

Finally, when you change focus with Alt + Tab the mouse still moves to the center of the active window. This is of course to prevent immediately losing focus again, but can still be a bit jarring at first.

As a minor note, the behavior you are referring to is a result of the window manager, not Linux itself. There are many window managers available for Linux, each with their own behaviour and options.