Back in Focus

On the weekend I installed a security update in advance of a full system upgrade. It took some time and several restarts, but once my computer was running again I got back to work on revising a lengthy post. In the midst of my work, though, my computer started beeping at me, and I realised the document window was greying out as if it was moving into the background. For a while I had to click in the window after just a few more words typed, which got in the way of revisions. One of my first thoughts was that I had a second document open in the same application for the sake of getting a better look at what I was revising, but closing it didn’t seem to stop the problem. Then, I started noticing the same greying-out problem with the windows of other programs. For a little while I wondered if restarting would solve the problem, and then if I’d have to try the full system upgrade sooner than I’d imagined.

To try something a little less extravagant, I decided to look in the official Apple support forums despite worries I’d just find unsolved complaints and fulminations. Settling on “window lost focus” as the most official alternative for “greyed out,” I hit on a thread that referred to an external discussion with an assortment of Python scripts to report on what program had grabbed focus. It took installing components with pip (I do get concerned about adding too many things to my computer without a clear sense of how to remove them later if necessary), but I did get a recommended script running in Terminal, and at last when a window greyed out I saw a menu bar icon for a “cleaning program” was grabbing focus. The icon was easy enough to shut down, and the problem hasn’t recurred.

I have seen insistences “cleaning programs” are more trouble than they’re worth, and the program did have a tendency to remind me to run it just when I was intent on doing other things. I’d never quite taken it up on its offer to clear out every cache and remove the foreign language modules from programs. Recalling the recommendation for it had come from the direction of TidBITS remains my one balance against sorting out how to uninstall it.