I've been looking for a way to screenshot a window that is not on top. It's not minimized, just covered by another one which is active.
For instance, let's say I want to screenshot an online chat (window 1, not active, running in the background, not minimized) while watching a youtube video (window 2, active, showing on screen).
I'm pretty sure there are ways to do this, most of flash application keep rendering even when covered by another window.
Currently, I havn't found anything reliable.
I have been looking at C++ solutions and python ones (but I'd rather have a python one). A VBA one would be great too since I often work with macros.
I also though of creating a virtual dual screen, and assigning the window I want to screenshot to it, to have it rendering the window. But I don't know how and if it could work.
If you have any ideas, let me know :)
Thank you
Related
I created a PyGTK application which needs to be always on top. The transparent window redirects mouse clicks to the window below and therefore gets out of focus once you click into an underlaying window. This is the intended behaviour. In fact it should just show a little image that's always above everything.
This works well unless you use something like the libreoffice fullscreen presentation. The presentation window is marked as always on top as well and hence my window goes into the background. Even if I take it to front using Alt+Tab and then click onto the underlaying libreoffice slide (which is neccessary) my window goes into the background again.
This is a really specific question and the solution should work on both Linux and Windows. I have no idea what I should do. I just found many questions on how to have a windows always on top but none of them covering my problem.
Long story short: How can I put my window always on top of every window that is always on top as well?
Simple Answer: You can use 'Always on Top' in windows with by using AutoHotKey scripts.
Follow these steps:
Install AutoHotKey
Create a new AHK scripts following the images
Add this code ^SPACE:: Winset, Alwaysontop, , A
Next, double-click your script to run it. You’ll know it’s running
because a green “H” logo appears in your system tray to let you know
it’s running as a background process.
Now press Ctrl+Space to set any currently active window to be always
on top. Press Ctrl+Space again set the window to no longer be always
on top.
I have a program that has some rather bad window handling. I can provide scripting to the client portion of the application but have no control over the non-client portion, apart from some simple movement/resizing commands (that don't help).
The main problem is that when the windows "maximize" button is pressed the WS_MAXIMIZE style is not set. The window is positioned correctly, and helpfully respects the taskbar settings but the application icon/title and "windows buttons" are misplaced and the borders show up on any other screens.
Using winspy++ I was able to set the WS_MAXIMIZE style fixing these graphical annoyances. but this also led into a secondary issue. The "restore" button also does nothing, when pressed it simply reverts the style and does not take the application back to it's pre-maximized position and size.
I was going to make a launcher for this program in Python anyway, to handle some .ini stuff and alterable executable parameters.
I would like to extend this launcher to silently run behind the application, fixing these issues.
These things were intended to be handled by the operating system and the developers of the application do not seem to be focused on working on these problems, but more on increasing the library of application scripting and porting to other systems.
My assumption is that when the launcher is commanded to run the program it needs to have access to the thread/process so that it can poll the position and size of the application window and set the appropriate style when it is required, and more importantly (I guess), have access to it's memory.
Example: [-8,-8] to [1374,776] on a 1366x768 screen with a minimized taskbar.
If there is an asynchronous method to detect when the window has been moved/resized/windows buttons pressed, that would be preferable to polling every step.
Supplying the window with "restore" information to make use of the restore button seems a bit less trivial. I have been reading as much reference as I can find but have not found anything on this. Where is this memory stored? How do I access it? Is it read-only, and only set by the OS?
I'm new to Python, and SO, so I apologize if my question doesn't fit here, I've tried.
This question is about Veusz, a python-based plotting program. Not about usage, but about where to start hacking to fix a particular problem... This is on Windows.
Currently, when the program is launched it starts non-maximized, even if it was maximized last time it was closed. I can modify the shortcut to always start maximized but new windows opened within the app are always non-maximized.
Although it doesn't remember its maximized state, it does remember the size of last non-maximized window. As a workaround, I tried positioning the program top-left and resizing it as if it were maximized. However, when I open new windows from this one, they are offset from the top-left corner by the height of the "window bar". The offset does not cascade though; that is, opening a new window from an offset one results in a window in the same position.
I've been pawing through the program's files looking for somewhere window position might be saved or a default might be set. Not seeing anything, though. This is a Qt app so perhaps it's not Veusz-specific but I'm inclined to think it is. Spyder, for instance is Qt-based but I don't see this problem with it.
Does the community have any suggestions regarding changing this behavior? I don't understand the setup routine well enough yet. The source is on Github if you're feeling that helpful.
The relevant code is here in functions closeEvent (for saving state) and setupWindowGeometry (for loading state).
https://github.com/jeremysanders/veusz/blob/master/veusz/windows/mainwindow.py
Veusz needs to save the state of the window, as well as the geometry. Maybe doing something like this http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/restoring-geometry.html
Pressing command-H in OSX immediately hides the active window. How do I achieve the same effect, programmatically, from Python? Specifically, I'd like to find a particular window that my application creates and then be able to show & hide it programmatically.
I already know how to do this with pywin32 but I'm afraid my expertise there doesn't quite cover OSX as well.
If it helps, the window in question is one created by pygame. I know that pygame has pygame.display.iconify() but that doesn't satisfy my requirements - the window doesn't disappear immediately, but rather the disappearance is animated, and there's no corresponding "uniconify" function that I can find.
Well, this ended up working. When I want to hide the window, I do pygame.display.quit() and make my code properly handle not having a display. When I want to show it, I do pygame.display.set_mode(...) with the former resolution.
The net effect is that of hiding & showing the window. Unfortunately the window gets created in a different spot than where it started, and although apparently you can tell SDL to create the window in a particular spot, I haven't been able to find a way to get the window's location...
Is there any way I can create a UAC-like environment in Python? I want to basically lock the workstation without actually using the Windows lock screen. The user should not be able to do anything except, say, type a password to unlock the workstation.
You cannot do this without cooperation with operating system. Whatever you do, Ctrl-Alt-Del will allow the user to circumvent your lock.
The API call you're looking for Win32-wise is a combination of CreateDesktop and SetThreadDesktop.
In terms of the internals of Vista+ desktops, MSDN covers this, as does this blog post. This'll give you the requisite background to know what you're doing.
In terms of making it look like the UAC dialog - well, consent.exe actually takes a screenshot of the desktop and copies it to the background of the new desktop; otherwise, the desktop will be empty.
As the other answerer has pointed out - Ctrl+Alt+Delete will still work. There's no way around that - at least, not without replacing the keyboard driver, anyway.
As to how to do this in Python - it looks like pywin32 implements SetThreadDesktop etc. I'm not sure how compatible it is with Win32; if you find it doesn't work as you need, then you might need a python extension to do it. They're not nearly as hard to write as they sound.
You might be able to get the effect you desire using a GUI toolkit that draws a window that covers the entire screen, then do a global grab of the keyboard events. I'm not sure if it will catch something like ctrl-alt-del on windows, however.
For example, with Tkinter you can create a main window, then call the overrideredirect method to turn off all window decorations (the standard window titlebar and window borders, assuming your window manager has such things). You can query the size of the monitor, then set this window to that size. I'm not sure if this will let you overlay the OSX menubar, though. Finally, you can do a grab which will force all input to a specific window.
How effective this is depends on just how "locked out" you want the user to be. On a *nix/X11 system you can pretty much completely lock them out (so make sure you can remotely log in while testing, or you may have to forcibly reboot if your code has a bug). On windows or OSX the effectiveness might be a little less.
I would try with pygame, because it can lock mouse to itself and thus keep all input to itself, but i wouldn't call this secure without much testing, ctr-alt-del probably escape it, can't try on windows right now.
(not very different of Bryan Oakley's answer, except with pygame)