How To: Mouse Hover Makes Window Active ?

what i could not find, though, was information on how to focus on windows by simply hovering over them with the mouse.

Back in XP, you could enable this with Tweak UI, which called it X-mouse.

It was great, i didn't have to click on a window to work in it.

but how to enable this in 7?

OPTION #1

As this article points out, you can switch windows by hovering if you enable it through:

Control Panel> Ease of Access> Change How Your Mouse Works

scroll down, check box "Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse"

this method raises windows to the front when you hover over them.

OPTION #2

For a true X-mouse experience, you could use this third party software TXMouse:

True X-Mouse Gizmo for Windows

if you are familiar with Linux x-mouse behaviour, you might appreciate its other functions.

OPTION #3

If you don't need those extra functions, you can make a couple swift changes in the registry and achieve the same effect:

Step #1:

Open regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktop

Edit UserPreferenceMask value to be 9F 3E 07 80 12 00 00 00

[You should only have to modify the first pair]

Step #2:

Also in HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktop

Edit ActiveWndTrkTimeout, change 'Base' to Decimal and put in 150 as the 'Value Data'

[this value is time in milliseconds that it takes for the focus to change.

to avoid some issues with the taskbar I recommended using a value like 150 or so,

but if you'd like to have a different delay before the window loses focus, set it to whatever you like.]

Step #3:

Log off and log back in

Information   (Added by John Galt)

Here is the registry key to do that if you don't want to edit the registry yourself. Hover window select.reg

Here is the registry key to restore the default values. Default Windows hover.reg

this results in windows being active (but not being raised) when you hover over them.