Windows 8.1 , ConEmu 170316 [32] {Preview}
I have multiple Conemu instances running, where each instance equals one "workspace".
I would like to be able to switch to this workspaces with autohotkey or pywinauto. However they require a criterion for selecting the right window, and usually I employ a combination of window title and or window class type.
Is there any setting in conemu that can help me achieve this criterion identifiation for window selection? If there isn't, I will have to write the PID down somewhere when I start the conem windows, then read it to bring up the right window at window activation time.
I can say only about pywinauto. When you call app = Application().start('ConEmu64.exe') pywinauto already remembers process PID and every new WindowSpecification object assumes this PID. Of course, it's true only if you're controlling start of ConEmu (or any other app). More details can be found in the Getting Started Guide.
Method app.connect(title="some unique tab name") will also remember the PID in app object. But if there are few instances with the same title, you need to disambiguate it using found_index=0 criterion, for example. Or right click on the tab and choose "Rename tab..." context menu item which changes the window title.
I took a short look at ConEmu. Toolbars and tabs are visible even to Spy++. So the most of actions can be automated. Just not sure about console inside a tab. If you want to type some commands, it's much better to use standard Python module subprocess because GUI automation for console programs looks very very strange. ;)
As per faq (ty Maximus) - see option 1:
1) Use -title “Window name” switch to explicitly set window title of new ConEmu instance. The example below starts new ConEmu window with title My server and ssh to your.server.com inside. Does not matter if you run another tab, or several tabs from task, the ConEmu window title remains My server. So you may rely on the title for selecting the window with class name VirtualConsoleClass.
Option 2 is also valid. I'd have to (1) create a config, and (2) hardcode the hashed id in ahk / pywinauto. Just using the window title name seems the right thing to do in my case, the app id setup seems overkill
2) Windows 7 introduced AppUserModelID. ConEmu uses executable path name and some switches (like -config, -loadcfgfile, -quake) to create a hash to form AppID, which you may see in the About / SysInfo. Current version shows 1d5372066082f23b41ba6aa278e56e9d::163. The trailing ::163 depicts ConEmu internal protocol version which may (and most probably would) be changed in the future. The hash itself is expected to be unchanged. You may query the ID from running ConEmu process using Windows API function GetApplicationUserModelId.
Thank you Maximus!
Related
Ctrl+Escape is a global Windows shortcut for opening main system menu. But I would like my Qt application to use this shortcut without triggering Windows main menu. I know it is probably a bad idea to override system shortcuts in general, but I would like to use this shortcut is a very limited use case.
This usecase is as follows. I have a popup window containing several rows or items. This window is opened by Ctrl+Tab and while the user holds Ctrl and keep pressing Tab, the current rows are cycled through. When the user releases Ctrl, the current row is used for some operation... But sometimes it happens that user presses Ctrl+Tab and then realizes he does not want to continue. He usually presses Escape while still holding Ctrl. And then it triggers Windows system menu and normal user gets confused, choleric user get angry... which is a bad thing. In other words I would like to be able to close the popup window when user presses Ctrl+Escape. How to do that? It is even possible?
If I write the code using this shortcut like any other short, it does not work and it always triggers Windows main menu.
As I understand it, Qt will typically not receive the key event if the underlying window system has intercepted it. For example even QtCreator cannot override system-wide shortcuts.
This question is almost a duplicate of: C++/Qt Global Hotkeys
While that question is asking specifically to capture shortcuts in a hidden/background application, I think the basic concept is the same -- capture shortcuts before the window system processes them.
From that answer, UGlobalHotkey seems pretty good, and the How to use System-Wide Hotkeys in your Qt application blog post could be useful for your limited-use case (but read the comments on that blog post about fixing the example).
Also found:
https://github.com/mitei/qglobalshortcut
https://github.com/Skycoder42/QHotkey (looks like a more detailed version of above)
I am trying to automate a self made GUI in python with pywinauto.
I am starting the application with app = Application().start(...) and get the window with dlg = app.top_window_().
In the next step I want to double-click an item from a list. But I do not know how.
I tried to use the Inspect.exe. By clicking on "navigate to children" I get the list which has no name. Clicking again on "navigate to children" shows the name of the item I want to click.
So, how can I refer to this item?
I thought about something like dlg.itemname.double_click(button='left')? I can only find examples in which they are pressing menu entries.
From what you're describing I can assume you use Application(backend="uia") (or must use) because Inspect.exe uses UI Automation technology which is supported by UIA backend in pywinauto.
And yes, you're almost right about double click. This should look so:
dlg.itemname.double_click_input(button='left')
# or
dlg.itemname.click_input(button='left', double=True)
How would I know? Detecting items as separate controls are typical for UIA backend.
For default Win32 backend (what you can see in Spy++ tool) a list view or a list box always have virtual items that are accessible by wrapper methods only, not as separate controls.
I want to retrieve information from a tooltip in the system tray programmatically.
The image shows the tooltip.
Now, I found that by using Microsoft's inspect.exe, which is "a Windows-based tool that enables you select any UI element and view the element's accessibility data", that it is in theory possible to retrieve this value programmatically.
Hovering over the the pandora icon in the toolbar shows me the following properties
It shows one property "name" that contains the exact data I need. I'm unsure how to retrieve this value programmatically using the win32api. I have a hwnd to the pandora icon already.
Additionally, a different ui spy tool, UiSpy.exe calls this same property "helpText" (different song name :p)
I tried using getWindowText(pandoraSystrayIconHwnd) but that returns a different text. Does anyone know what this "name" value is, and how I can retrieve it using the win32api? It should be possible because inspect.exe is an external program that can access the data somehow
I'm doing this in Python, as the target application is written in Python already.
These spy apps are probably using Active Accessibility and/or UI Automation.
You can try calling AccessibleObjectFromWindow on the toolbar HWND or AccessibleObjectFromPoint if you care about the mouse position and then call IAccessible::get_accName.
Keep in mind that the classname and window hierarchy of the tray icon toolbar is undocumented.
If you only care about Pandora and not other applications then I would strongly suggest that you look for other alternatives first. Perhaps they have a hidden window with the title etc.
If you don't mind hacks then you could take a look at TraySaver, it is open source and knows the internal format of the data stored for each icon in the tray toolbar. Keep in mind that it is pretty old and might not work on newer versions of Windows. If you go down this path (and I don't recommend it) then you have to remember that you need to support both 32-bit and 64-bit Explorer.
Maybe GUI automation library pywinauto could help you. It uses Win32 API or UI Automation under the hood (by your choice). Core concept is described in the Getting Started Guide.
Method .window_text() returns exactly the same as Name property shows in Inspect.exe.
To interact with tray area icons you can use this example on StackOverflow.
I want to programmatically create one and only one Terminal.app window that's uniquely identified by a literal Terminal.app window title (let's call it 'MyConsole1') and send bash commands to said window for the life of the Terminal.app process.
Can this be done with Terminal.app, and if so, how?
Details
My program probably needs to check if 'MyConsole1' is already open before I go try to create a new one. And of course, start Terminal.app if it's not already running. I also want the commands issued to and over the life of 'MyConsole1' (by my program) to be bash-command-history retrievable by a human user; ie, the user can interact with 'MyConsole1' if desired. I'm not concerned about user-vs-program "conflicts" that might arise for use of the 'MyConsole1'.
I presume I need AppleScript to do this. I will be running the AppleScript as part of a much-larger Python application, possibly via a method like this, in case that matters.
I see how Terminal.app window/tab title(s) can be set like this, but this solution doesn't work for my requirements above. Further, I only want 1 tab in the window, and the title to apply to the entire window, and not just the tab.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but you can try this:
tell app "Terminal"
activate
do script ""
end tell
In python, I enumerate top-level windows through EnumWindows, and also I enumerate the processes through EnumProcesses.
Then in the python script, I put all the window handles which belongs to the same pid into one list (I did this through GetWindowThreadProcessId).
Later I found out something: there are 3 window handles which belong to notepad.exe, but I only open one text file.
Why?
Besides, I tried to set the text window as the foreground window through SetForegroundWindow, I passed the three window handles to this function, and two work.
How could this be ?
Processes sometimes create invisible windows for their own purposes. You should ignore them (use IsWindowVisible function).
To investigate this kind of things your best friend is Spy++, that comes with several versions of Visual Studio, if you can get it.
According to it, notepad.exe creates three top-level windows:
The visible main window, class name "Notepad", overlapped.
A hidden, disabled, pop-up window, class name "MSCTFIME UI", caption "M".
Another hidden, disabled, pop-up window, class name "IME", caption "Default IME".
The two hidden windows are used internally by notepad to implement the IME (Input Method Editor), the GUI to type complex scripts.
Many programs create top-level hidden windows for a lot of things. For what you intend, you can ignore them all and use only the visible ones.