Ordering Windows

Overview

Although with Exposé the orientation among windows is much better than before, still there remain cases when you may want to just remove an obscuring window for the moment from the foreground, without changing the window layout otherwise: especially without miniaturizing the window into Dock.

Also, there are cases when you may want to put an inactive window to foreground, so that it may partially obscure the active window, into which you are writing (or whatever). The reason might be that you want the other window for a reference, or just the frontmost one for taking an area snapshot, whilst still keeping the active window active.

Somewhat like the NeXTStep Window Server of ancient times, OCSmart Hacks allows you to send a window to background or to bring a window to foreground without activating or deactivating any of them.

User Interface

Just ⌘-click a title of any window (outside its name, which is used by the standard system code to show the path for document-based windows): the window would immediately go to the very back, under all other windows. The active window and application are not changed: therefore, if you ⌘-click the title of the active window, you may make it obscured by inactive ones and still keep writing into it: note the active window title and the cursor in the TextEdit window on the picture:

This would not be possible at all without OCSmart Hacks.

Note that you still can ⌘-drag the window by its title without changing its position: OCSmart Hacks send the window back only if you click at the title (i.e., press&release the mouse button); if you begin dragging instead, the window is not sent back. If you happen to have a two-button mouse though, there is a much more convenient option for such dragging in OCSmart Hacks: check please the Resizing and Moving Windows Help page.

Similarly, you can bring any window to the front without activating it. Just ⌘-rightclick anywhere into the window (it does not need to be into the title!) to bring it front. We do apologize to those who happen to have a single-button mouse, but after all, this service is relatively seldom used, compared with the former one of sending a window to background.

Note that these services work well with torn-off menus too, presumed you have set them to mix with plain windows (see the Tear-off Menus Help page for details).

Customization

Alas, it does not seem possible to make the modifier (⌘) or the rightclick customizable: the problem is that the Window Server itself does much work with windows without the application code help (which is, of course, The Right Thing). For us though the unfortunate result is that it is not possible to click into any part of a window with any modifier combination but the sole ⌘ without immediately making it active (and perhaps even hiding the previous application, in case of ⌥).