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If you’ve ever used the great GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, on a Mac then you’ll no doubt have been frustrated with the way X11 seems to handle window focus. Fortunately there is a solution and its just a couple of simple terminal commands away…

When selecting tools from their dialog in GIMP on your Mac then you are required to click once to give that window focus and again to actually select the tool you require. The same two clicks are required again to actually use your tool.  You can either imagine or know first hand how annoying this becomes and its a shame for such a great piece of software to be blighted by this issue so lets fix it.

Firstly you’ll want to open your terminal (who could live without it… mine’s almost always open!). Then you want to enter either of the following commands depending on whether you’ve got XQuartz updates (and if you’re not sure just do both sets).

Without XQuartz updates:

• defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm -bool false
• defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_click_through -bool true

With XQuartz updates:

• defaults write org.x.x11 wm_ffm -bool false
• defaults write org.x.x11 wm_click_through -bool true

You should now find that you only need the proper amount (2) of clicks to select and use your tool of choice. This leaves you free to spend your time bothering about something else that annoys you like having to Cmd-Tab to X11 instead of GIMP when you’ve been switching between apps!