I would like to configure Ubuntu 20.04 (with Gnome shell) so that if I click a window which does not have focus, that click raises the window and does nothing else; in particular, that click to raise the window does not actually have an effect on the window (so I can click where a button is without activating that button). In the old days on the Mac this, clicks triggering actions in background windows, was called "click-through"; it's the default in GNOME Shell and I'd like to disable it.
The reason for this is that it is very hard to click on a window to raise it without also clicking on a button inside it!
Almost all the visible areas of that Nautilus window are "active" areas in some way; clicking in that window to focus and raise it will also change the folder that it is currently displaying.
Some clarifications:
- This is not about the window focus mode (focus-follows-mouse or sloppy focus). Windows are focused by clicking on them; I do not want focus-follows-mouse, and it is not what this question is about.
- This is about raising a window and giving it the focus by clicking on the window. I can switch to that window in other ways (alt-tab, for example, or by choosing it from the Dock) but I want to be able to click on a window to focus it and raise it, exactly as I currently can, but I don't want to have to be careful to only click on an "inactive" area of that window to focus it.
- Yes, this problem is exacerbated by how there are not very many "inactive" areas in a window now that the title bar contains buttons. That's not what this question is about, and I am quite happy with the window containing many buttons, as long as I'm not forced to click one of them just in order to give the window focus.
I am informed by Mattias Wernér that Super+Click does exactly this (raises a window without the click being received by the window itself), which is great, and so it is possible that this question should be rephrased as "how do I make click on unfocused windows do what Super+click does?".
