Very nice! One question: would it be possible to implement "Focus Follows Mouse" on a mac? At the moment one has to click first to get the focus to the sidebar windows, and only then can one click on the desired tab.

Oh that's interesting. On Windows, a single click on a row in the sidebar both activates the sidebar and sends that click through to do row-focus as well.

Marking this as planned -- should not be hard at all to implement "focus row on mouse hover" as an option.

I don't think "focus row on mouse hover" was what was asked for. At least I'm having exactly the same problem as the OP (on a Mac) and "focus on mouse row" doesn't help.

The problem is that the first click on the Sidewise window is ignored - it only serves to focus the window. Then you have to wait (so it's not a double click), then click again to actually switch tabs or otherwise interact with the window. Excel on Windows has the same problem. The fix would be to make the click that focuses the window actually be interpreted as a real click on the window as well. To capture and respond to all mouse events equally, regardless of whether the window has focus. I'm not sure how easy this is on OSX, but Chrome itself does it (ie. when the Sidewise window is in focus, any clicks on the Chrome window both focus the Chrome window and action the click), and every other app I've tried does too.

On a very related note, a similar problem is that when the Sidewise window doesn't have focus, mousing over the window does not cause the tab rows to highlight as it does when the window has focus. Again, when the Chrome window doesn't have focus, mousing over tabs does highlight the X buttons as expected, so it seems possible.

I don't think anyone wants the ability to mouse over the window and have it automatically switch tabs or something. I just want to not have to do an extra click to focus the window before being able to do anything with it.

I had the same problem for awhile, until I found a rough workaround - there is a free program called "Afloat" that allows you to pin the sidebar so that it is always on top of the browser window. There are some problems with using it (the sidebar will cover other app windows, for example, and will need to be minimized), but it's been a good band-aid in my experience, at least until Sidewise allows you to focus the sidebar (and not row) on hover. I think that might be difficult to implement. 

http://infinite-labs.net/afloat/#download

I think Karl Hendrikse explained exactly what the problem is. And that is the only thing that is preventing me to switch from FF+Tree Style Tabs to Chrome+Sidewise.

"focus row on mouse hover" indeed does something different than what was asked for by claudio. on chrome for mac, the click-to-focus-then-click-to-do-something workflow is actually killing the usability. Especially because you can't easily tell if sidewise already got the focus. i think that a solution here could largely increase the popularity of this - otherwise great - tool among mac users. ;)

I have just released an update that adds a "Focus sidebar on mouse hover" option. Hopefully this is the behavior you guys are looking for.

Based on reading through your descriptions of how OSX behaves, I decided not to make this option also unfocus the sidebar when the mouse pointer moves off it. Since you describe Chrome itself as behaving properly with respect to receiving clicks while unfocused in OSX, this will hopefully still work fine.

Please let me know whether this is working as desired now. This isn't exactly "focus sidebar on click and then also click the item" as requested, but in contrast to that solution, my current solution should enable visual row-hover effects and tooltips to work as expected in the sidebar.

nope. doesn't work (Version 2013.7.25.0). interestingly, when having the focus on chrome and hovering over to the sidewise window, the first item you hover over is highlighted light-blue, and the respective tooltip follows a second later. hovering over another item does not change that highlight, unless you shortly hover over to chrome and back to sidewise.

the focus, however, stays on chrome all the time, and if i want to interact with an item, i still have to first click on the sidewise window to get the focus.

How annoying! :D

OK, I will try to implement it differently (click focuses and then sends the click through) in the near future.

The current version fixes 50% of the problem! It's becoming great and I think that now I can switch to Chrome.

When I point the mouse to Sidewise, it gets focus and I can click the tab only once to get to it. The only problem is that when I click the tab on sidewise, Chrome gets the focus. And then if I want to select another tab, I have to click Sidewise twice: once to get the focus and twice to actually click the tab's title.

It would be great if the focus followed the mouse no matter what. The focus should only go to Chrome if I hover its window.

Keep up the good work!

Makes a lot of sense. Putting this change on the todo list!

Has there been any development for this request? I also recently switched from Firefox+Tree Style Tabs to Chrome+Sidewise on my Mac and I love it!!! The "Focus the sidebar on mouse hover" solves halve of the issue.

Would it be possible to add another option like when leaving the Sidewise-window (onmouseleave event or something like that) to switch back to the last opened window of Chrome (same as shortkey CMD + ~)? If a tab for another window would be clicked the focus can change to that window, but as soon as the cursor is being detected in de Sidewise-window again it should change focus back to the Sidewise window, so that when the cursor is leaving the window the shortkey CMD + ~ works for the right window.

Also I would like to add that the "Focus the sidebar on mouse hover" function should ónly be active when the Chrome program is active. Now when I'm using another program as soon as the cursor enters the Sidewise-window area it shift focus which means I'm not using the program I want to use anymore. This can be really annoying! I know most Windows-users maximise their windows, but on a Mac most users have multiple windows from different programs overlapping each other, so this becomes an issue.

Thanks very much for (hopefully) processing my input!