I can understand the problem, but isn't there a sort of "gordian knot" solution for this? In other words, can't you "domesticate" autoraise into a kinder, gentler autofocus?

When you keydown and your mouse isn't within the current window:

1. Store the z-positions of all windows (if you haven't already)

2. raise the window you're hovering over to the front and focus it

3. re-send the event

4. set a timer to reset the z-positions of all windows, refocusing the old window

5. if you happen to click anywhere, simply kill the timer and throw away the z-stack.

Hopefully, any animations associated with window refocusing could temporarily be turned off for both z-shuffling events, and in the interstice there could be some smooth "fade-decay" effect that shows that the window is indeed receiving input behind it, but only temporarily. Feels Apple-y already.

No way could I live without focus follows mouse. His description of the annoyance is perfect.

It's also a good example of why open source matters, even for low level stuff. To make his computer work like he wants, all he can do is ask Apple nicely and hope. Maybe he'll even get his wish because he's famous, but I'd much rather have the source code.

I've played with KDE 4 a bit, and it looks like it steals Apple's font antialiasing algorithm... at least for Konqueror. It's really pretty.

The nice part is that it works fine with xmonad, which is something I couldn't give up. I used to take great pride in perfectly arranging my windows. Complete waste of time, it's much nicer to have the computer do it for you.

I used to be a big f-f-m fan, but it doesn't make sense in the Mac UI at all, due to the menubar (as he notes). So I got over it.

But the big missing feature that doesn't contradict the UI at all is the ability to lower a window. It would solve his "I want to type 'make' over there but then end up with the terminal window on the bottom", too.

Is OS X font rendering that much nicer? I use Ubuntu with hinting turned off and no subpixel rendering (just gray) and it looks beautiful.

Could anyone who has access to both OS X and GNU/Linux post side-by-side screenshots to compare the two?

I guess I'm in an even smaller minority.

I use OS X, but I wish I could have the old sawfish behavior, where clicking on a window gave it focus but did not raise it, and clicking on a window's title-bar gave it focus and raised it.

There's a third flavor of FFM: http://glyphobet.net/blog/essay/234