On older versions of Windows, it was possible to write a utility that would emulate focus follows pointer, by installing a global message hook. More recent versions prevent messing around with focus across applications for obvious security reasons
That is the cool part about living on Windows and part of me gets sadder every time they try to limit it. I understand the rationale, but I still like to be able to tinker with 3rd party software while it's running. The whole concept of app isolation just rubs me wrong.
Yeah, there's quite a lot of Raymond Chen posts with the theme of "we had to take this cool feature out because people were abusing it". Only way round that is to go full Apple and refuse to run unvetted applications.
Maybe we need a flavour of UAC that allows you to put random junk apps in sandboxes while the others talk happily among each other.
The native way, which still works on Windows 10, is to call SystemParametersInfo() with SPI_SETACTIVEWINDOWTRACKING, SPI_SETACTIVEWNDTRKZORDER, and SPI_SETACTIVEWNDTRKTIMEOUT, followed by a broadcast WM_SETTINGCHANGE message. See my MouseWinX tool I linked elsewhere if you want an example.
