The CURSOR procedure fails or GUI interface loses focus on Mac OS X 10.7 and later

PROBLEM:

In Mac OS 10.7 and later, a couple of issues can occur in IDL related to the X11 or XQuartz preferences.

A. One issue that may occur is the CURSOR procedure will pause and not recognize any mouse input in the display window. (This state may require you to use Control+c to return control to the IDL> prompt.)

B. Another issue is that when using the WIDGET_DROPDOWN routine in an IDL GUI, the window loses focus and the controls are grayed out. An additional click is required to bring the window back into focus thus requiring two clicks to generate the button event.

(Note that these behaviors do not seem to occur with supported versions of IDL running on Mac 10.6.8.)

SOLUTION:

These issues can be fixed when the XQuartz/X11 settings are adjusted to click through inactive windows. To do this, make the following XQuartz/X11 preference change:

1. Select the X11 > Preferences... menu item, then select "Windows" pane in the X11 Preferences dialog.

2. Enable "Click-through Inactive Windows."

 

 reviewed 11/4/2013 by ju, kk