Front and Center

Revive old windows behaviour.

Way back in the days before OS X, when you clicked on a window in a Mac application, all the windows for that application were brought to the front.

In OS X and now in macOS, only the window you click is brought to the front, the others remain in the background. For applications that have a separate window for each document, like Word and Excel, that’s an issue.

Front and Center fixes that by restoring pre-OS X behaviour and bringing all the windows in an app to the front when you click one.

Front and Center’s interface is a menu bar item with two options: Classic and Modern. The former restores pre-OS X, aka classic behaviour, while the latter option reactivates the macOS window layering.

In either mode, up arrowclicking a window will do the opposite. You can also create a list of apps to exclude from Front and Center’s instruction.

And that’s it, a simple, one-trick app that you’ll either love or won’t understand what the fuss is about. And that’s the point. If you miss classic window behaviour, Front and Center is for you; if not, you can simply move along.

It may be simple, but Front and Center will delight many older Mac users.