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How to disable keyboard shortcut Alt+F4, in PyQt5? [duplicate]

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)

Access the built-in shortcuts of PyQt5 components?

I'm very keen on being able to use the keyboard to do everything with a GUI and am currently exploring QTreeView and QTableView among other things.
I'm adding a lot of my own hotkeys (shortcuts) and am devising a method to automate a user list or guide to these available hotkeys.
But something like QTreeView also comes with its own built-in hotkeys, e.g. arrow keys for navigation, F2 to start editing, Ctrl-A for "select all", etc.. I want to get a comprehensive list of these and include them in the automatically generated user guide.
I've got to this page, for example, but I haven't really got a clue how to dig down into PyQt5 components to unearth this kind of information programmatically.
There's some interesting functionality, probably unknown to many users, with QTreeView: e.g. if, in column 0, you have a tree structure you can skip from label (text) to label by pressing the first letter of each one's label. But if you enter 2 (or more) keys quickly enough this also works: entering "ra" will skip over "Roma" and "Rimini" to "Ravenna" even if "Roma" and "Rimini" come first. It turns out that this is implemented by QTreeView.keyboardSearch ... but what I want to know is whether it's possible to find details of the "mapping" functionality for this and other keyboard enablements, often implemented by keyPressEvent, programmatically. Having looked a little at the PyQt5 files it seems that a lot of PyQt5 functionality may ultimately be contained in .dll files (this is a W10 machine), so I'm not particularly optimistic.

Each widget has a certain behavior depending on the hotkeys pressed, so there is no documentation that indicates all the cases, so you will have to review the documentation of each class and the parent class. So for example to understand the behavior of QTableView you should also review the documentation of QAbstractItemView, QAbstractScrollArea and QFrame (the same is for QTreeView), considering the above we can collect information:
void QAbstractScrollArea::keyPressEvent(QKeyEvent *e)
This function is called with key event e when key presses occur. It
handles PageUp, PageDown, Up, Down, Left, and Right, and ignores all
other key presses.
QAbstractItemView:
void QAbstractItemView::keyPressEvent(QKeyEvent *event).
This function is called with the given event when a key event is sent
to the widget. The default implementation handles basic cursor
movement, e.g. Up, Down, Left, Right, Home, PageUp, and PageDown; the
activated() signal is emitted if the current index is valid and the
activation key is pressed (e.g. Enter or Return, depending on the
platform). This function is where editing is initiated by key press,
e.g. if F2 is pressed.
(emphasis mine)
QTableView and QTreeView when inheriting from QAbstractItemView have the same hotkeys.

GUI automation with pywinauto. Double clicking item in a list with no name

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.

How to simulate button presses in pyside?

What I'm trying to do:
I have a Python(PySide) and Qt/QML UI that today responds to keyboard input (actually it's an IR remote control, but the input events are received as though they were coming from a keyboard).
I want to be able to also respond to mouse events. So where today the user uses arrow keys to navigate to a particular button and presses OK (i.e., Return) to activate the handling for that button, I would like them to just be able to click the mouse on that button and get the same handling behavior.
What I have so far:
I've already got Keys.onReturnPressed: handling in my QML code that does what I need to do when the user presses OK/Return. And I've added MouseArea { ... onClicked: {...} ... } QML code that recognizes when I click on a given control. So I already see in my log when the mouse click events occur.
My question:
How do I tie them together? I want to make the onClicked: behavior just generate some kind of event (a signal, maybe?) that causes the onReturnPressed: handling to be invoked. (I'm not at all averse to passing events through the Python side of things if that's what it takes to make this work.)
(I guess I should mention here that the existing code includes some base classes (is that the right terminology here?) that can define behavior across ALL controls of a certain type (e.g., Buttons) in the system. So while each of the many, many Buttons has its own onReturnPressed: code providing its unique handling, my objective is to have a single onClicked: handler in the base class that makes all Buttons respond to clicks as they do to Return presses today.)
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
BTW: Yes, I'm aware that there's a second problem here, too, of navigation. That is, even once I've turned the mouse click into a press
of the Return key, I still have to solve the problem of associating it
with the right control on the screen.
I sort of didn't want to muddy the waters by asking too many things at once.
I'll get to that one
when I've got this one in hand. (...unless you've got a simple solution already up your sleeve... In that case I'm all ears.)

Using Mac’s Dictation Inside Python

Does anyone have any ideas on how to use the Mac’s built-in dictation tool to create strings to be used by Python?
To launch a dictation, you have to double-press the Fn key inside any text editor. If this is the case, is there a way to combine the keystroke command with the input command? Something like:
Step 1: Simulate a keystroke to double-press the Fn key, launching the Dictation tool, and then
Step 2. Creating a variable by using the speech-to-text content as part of the input function, i.e. text_string = input(“Start dictation: “)
In this thread (Can I use OS X 10.8's speech recognition/dictation without a GUI?) a user suggests he figured it out with CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent(src, 0x3F, true), but there is no code.
Any ideas? Code samples would be appreciated.
UPDATE: Thanks to the suggestions below, I've imported AppScript. I'm trying the code to work along these lines, with no success:
from appscript import app, its
se = app('System Events')
proc = app.processes[its.frontmost == True]
mi = proc.menu_bars[1].menu_bar_items['Edit'].menus[1].menu_items['Start Dictation']
user_voice_text = input(mi.click())
print(user_voice_text)
Any ideas on how I can turn on the dictation tool to be input for a string?
UPDATE 2:
Here is a simple example of the program I'm trying to create:
Ideally i want to launch the program, and then have it ask me: "what is 1 + 1?"
Then I want the program to turn on the dictation tool, and I want the program to record my voice, with me answering "two".
The dictation-to-text function will then pass the string value = "two" to my program, and an if statement is then used to say back "correct" or "incorrect".
Im trying to pass commands to the program without ever typing on the keyboard.

First, FnFn dictation is a feature of the NSText (or maybe NSTextView?) Cocoa control. If you've got one of those, the dictated text gets inserted into that control. (It also uses that control's existing text for context.) From the point of view of the app using an NSTextView, if you just create a standard Edit menu, the Start Dictation item gets added to the end, with FnFn as a shortcut, and anything that gets dictated appears as input, just like input typed on a keyboard, or pasted or dragged with the mouse, or via any other input method.
So, if you don't have a GUI app, enabling dictation is going to be pointless, because you have no way to get the input.
If you do have a GUI app, the simplest thing to do is just get the menu item via NSMenu, and click the item.
You're almost certainly using some kind of GUI library, like PyQt or Tkinter, which has its own way of accessing your app's menu. But if not, you can do it directly through Cocoa (using PyObjC—which comes with Apple's pre-installed Python, but which you'll have to pip install if you're using a third-party Python):
import AppKit
mb = AppKit.NSApp.mainMenu()
edit = mb.itemWithTitle_('Edit').submenu()
sd = edit.indexOfItemWithTitle_('Start Dictation')
edit.performActionForItemAtIndex_(sd)
But if you're writing a console program that runs in the terminal (whether Terminal.app or an alternative like iTerm), the app you're running under has its own text widget and Edit menu, and you can parasitically use its menu instead.
The problem is that you don't have permission to just control other apps unless the user allows it. In older versions of OS X, this was done just by turning on "assistive scripting for accessibility" globally. As of 10.10, there's an Accessibility anchor in the Privacy tab of the Security & Privacy pane of System Preferences that has a list of apps that have permissions. Fortunately, if you're not on the list, the first time you try to use accessibility features, it'll pop up a dialog, and if the user clicks on it, it'll launch System Preferences, reveal that anchor, add your app to the list with the checkbox disabled, and scroll it into view, so all the user has to do is click the checkbox.
The AppleScript to do this is:
tell application "System Events"
click (menu item "Start Dictation" of menu of menu bar item "Edit"
of menu bar of (first process whose frontmost is true))
end tell
The "right" way to do the equivalent in Python is via ScriptingBridge, which you can access via PyObjC… but it's a lot easier to use the third-party library appscript:
from appscript import app, its
se = app('System Events')
proc = app.processes[its.frontmost == True]
mi = proc.menu_bars[1].menu_bar_items['Edit'].menus[1].menu_items['Start Dictation']
mi.click()
If you really want to send the Fn key twice, the APIs for generating and sending keyboard events are part of Quartz Events Services, which (even though it's a CoreFoundation C API, not a Cocoa ObjC API) is also wrapped by PyObjC. The documentation can be a bit tricky to understand, but basically, the idea is that you create an event of the appropriate type, then either post it to a specific application, an event tap, or a tap location. So, you can create and send a system-wide key-down Fn-key event like this:
evt = Quartz.CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent(None, 63, True)
Quartz.CGEventPost(Quartz.kCGSessionEventTap, evt)
To send a key-up event, just change that True to False.