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...
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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 am currently working on a project using Python and tkinter.
The problem is that I don't know what's the proper way to display multiple windows, or screens, I don't know how to call them. Let me explain better.
When the application starts the login screen appears. After that, if I click register, I want to go to the register screen, but I don't want it to be a separate window (I don't want to have 2 windows displayed at the same time), but rather another window with different content ?!
How should I handle properly this situation? Create a second window using Toplevel and hiding the first (can I do that?) or changing the widgets of the first?
Code I've written so far
You can do that- just call window.withdraw() on the Toplevel you need to hide after creating a new Toplevel. Changing the widgets in the first is also an option- if you like, you could always try a Notebook widget and disable manual flipping or just put each "screen" in a frame and grid_ or pack_forget them to remove them from the window.
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
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)
I would like to create an application that has 3-4 frames (or windows) where each frame is attached/positioned to a side of the screen (like a task bar). When a frame is inactive I would like it to auto hide (just like the Windows task bar does; or the dock in OSX). When I move my mouse pointer to the position on the edge of the screen where the frame is hidden, I would like it to come back into focus.
The application is written in Python (using wxPython for the basic GUI aspects). Does anyone know how to do this in Python? I'm guessing it's probably OS dependent? If so, I'd like to focus on Windows first.
I don't do GUI programming very often so my apologies if this makes no sense at all.
As far as I know, there's nothing built in for this.
When the window is hidden, do you want it completely invisible or can a border of a few pixels be showing? That would be an easy way to get a mouse hover event. Otherwise you might have to use something like pyHook to get system-wide mouse events to know when to expand your window.
The events EVT_ENTER_WINDOW and EVT_LEAVE_WINDOW might also be useful here to know when the user has entered/left the window so you can expand/collapse it.
Expanding/collapsing can just be done by showing/hiding windows or resizing them. Standard window functions, nothing fancy.
By the way, you might want to use wx.ClientDisplayRect to figure out where to position your window. That will give you a rectangle of the desktop that does NOT include the task bar or any other toolbars the user has, assuming you want to avoid overlapping with those things.
Personally, I would combine the EVT_ENTER_WINDOW and EVT_LEAVE_WINDOW that FogleBird mentioned with a wx.Timer. Then whenever it the frame or dialog is inactive for x seconds, you would just call its Hide() method.
I think you could easily just make a window that is the same size as the desktop then do some while looping for an inactivity variable based on mouse position, then thread off a timer for loop for the 4 inactivity variables. I'd personally design it so that when they reach 0 from 15, they change size and position to become tabular and create a button on them to reactivate. lots of technical work on this one, but easily done if you figure it out