focus_follows_mouse with autofocus/autoraise stops working

[armyers]

Hi all,

as the title says, focus_follows_mouse stops working after just 1-2 mins. I'm running a macos sequoia 15.4.1 on M3 MBP with yabai-v7.1.14. I have two displays: MBP display and an external display. I have an external keyboard and mouse, but this is happening even when using only the MBP display with built-in keyboard and trackpad.

I've followed the instructions at https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai for changing the system settings on macos 15.x. I'm not using scripting additions so I've not changed any SIP settings, and I've run the command "defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true".

As I said, when I restart yabai, autofocus (or autoraise) works for a couple of minutes, maybe. Then stops working. My preference is autofocus but I've tried autoraise and get the same problem.

My config is:

yabai -m config focus_follows_mouse autofocus
yabai -m config mouse_follows_focus off
yabai -m config window_origin_display cursor
yabai -m config window_animation_duration 0.0
yabai -m config debug_output on

I've tried a config as simple as

yabai -m config focus_follows_mouse autofocus

and still get the same problem.

I've looked at the logs in /tmp/. The err log is empty, and the out log has a bunch of messages, of course, but nothing stands out to me.

Thanks for your assistance!

[itsonlyjames]

This issue occurs for me also, running Sequoia 15.5 and yabai v7.1.14.

Should this be opened as a bug ticket rather than being housed in the Q&A discussion?

[PhrantiK]

Already in issues, there's a couple of solutions in there:

#2217

There's a program in #2511 that might help.

Mine stops working randomly every few hours so just have a shorcut key bound in SKHD to get it working again.

[armyers]

thank you! I'll check those out. Somehow I missed those in my search... :/

[armyers]

duplicate of #2217

[Bellavene]

Here is a working solution

[armyers]

Hi,

thank you for your work to provide an alternative!

This works great for FFM with auto-raise, but I'm looking for FFM without auto-raise. I tried claude code to see if it could come up with a quck change that works but no luck. I'll have to dig into the HS apis myself. Do you think FFM w/o auto-raise is possible with hammerspoon, and if so, any pointers to where to start looking?

Thank you again!