AutoFocus For Mac

We lose track of just how much clicking we do on a daily basis, and it has potential drawbacks. It may slow you down in some cases, especially with a trackpad, but it’s especially troublesome for those who suffer from repetitive strain injuries, arthritis, or other medical concerns.

AutoFocus is an app that can both make your work more efficient and lessen the load on your joints. It makes it so that you don’t have to click when switching between one window and the other, allowing you to bring them to the foreground by just hovering the cursor over them.

The app works in a very straightforward fashion. Once activated, placing the cursor over a background window for a user-defined amount of time (0.05 seconds by default) will select that window and bring it to the foreground. You can also have it bring up all of the app’s windows, not just the selected one.

If you don’t want the function to be active at all times, you can configure it so that window switching will only happen when a modifier is pressed.

While this is disabled by default, AutoFocus can handle the desktop as another window, meaning that when the cursor is on the desktop, the most recent Finder window will be brought to the top. As with other apps, you have the option to bring up all opened Finder windows as well.

There is also a helpful shortcut for quickly minimizing all Finder windows. The standard macOS hotkey, Cmd+Shift+M, isn’t terribly convenient, but with AutoFocus you can just hold down Shift and move the cursor over another app to minimize all Finder windows.

The app can be configured from the menu bar, but you can also hide its status bar icon and access it from the global shortcut by launching it from Finder.

If you’re looking for something to reduce the strain on your finger joints or just improve overall productivity, AutoFocus is worth a look. It’s not going to be for everyone, but if it suits your workflow, it’s a great tool to have.