Activating Applications via AppleScript
On MacOS 12 Monterey (and apparently MacOS 11 Big Sur), what happens instead is that TextEdit becomes the active application but only its frontmost window comes forward.
On MacOS 10.15 Catalina, and all previous versions of MacOS back to Mac OS X 10.0, all of the open windows in an app come forward when you tell that app to activate in AppleScript, or with the equivalent in JavaScript for Automation[…]
I’m voting for bug. Here’s why:
NSRunningApplicationhas the exact same problem, whereNSApplicationActivateAllWindowsisn’t being honored. Started at around macOS 11.4, if I remember correctly.Bonus fun fact: Earlier macOS 11 versions had the inverse bug, where activating apps via
NSRunningApplicationalways behaved as ifNSApplicationActivateAllWindowswere set. Looks like they then attempted to fix it, overdid it, and then never got around to revisiting the problem.The only way (that I’m aware of) to get the correct behavior is using
SetFrontProcessWithOptions(), which is deprecated. Sigh.
Previously:
Ironically, I never noticed any of this in Keyboard Maestro because Keyboard Maestro still actively uses SetFrontProcessWithOptions (sadly despite it being deprecated) due to various other bugs in NSRunningApplication activation (bugs that are old enough that they have radar numbers (18980463) instead of Feedback numbers, sigh).
But sure Apple, deprecate the old APIs and replace them with broken new APIs, I'm sure that'll be fine.