Operating on/focusing a window without changing the viewport

[tsdh]

I usually have a workspace where the first two columns are two windows which are both a bit wider than half of the output width, i.e., when I have the second window focused, I can see a good part of the right side of the first window. In that situation, I frequently want to quickly operate on the left window (press a button, paste some text in it) and then go on working in the right window.

Right now, when I do that, e..g. click in the left window, the viewport scrolls horizontally so that the left window becomes completely visible which is a bit distracting in my use-case where I immediately go on working on the right window, possibly repeatedly, like copy & pasting many chunks of text from the right to the left window.

I wonder if there was some way to focus a window without scrolling the viewport to make it completely visible (or center it, depending on layout#center-focused-column). For example, clicking with the mouse while holding Shift could set the input focus to the clicked window without scrolling the viewport.