I've got a program which is using multiple monitors. The program is showing special visualizations on the second monitor. At one point, the program uses windows shell functions to send files to the recycle bin. However, when it does this, the delete confirmation dialog comes on top of my visualization. This is particularly problematic, as when the mouse is on the second monitor, my program uses mouse hooks to capture all mouse input, so the user cannot even click the confirmation dialog.
Is it possible to somehow tell Windows to only place dialog boxes on a particular display?
I'm using python, though if I have to call C WinAPI functions that shouldn't be a problem
which function are you using to send the files to the recycle bin? if you use SHFileOperation you can pass a parent HWND. perhaps make that an invisible WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW window on the other monitor.
i would expect the API, treating that window as a parent, would center relative to that window, but i haven't tried it.
depending on which version of Windows you are targeting, there used to be a capability to create desk bands that 'dock' to the sides of the screen. this automatically gets factored into the area returned as rcWork by GetMonitorInfo and should prevent dialogs from overlapping this space. There might be another way to declare that a region is "in use" in a way that declares space off-limits, but I don't know of it so it probably doesn't exist...
the ugly and crude thing you could do is poll and move the dialog yourself, but if this is any kind of widely deployed or commercial app that would likely cause more harm than good.
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.
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
The standalone flashplayer takes no arguments other than a .swf file when you launch it from the command line. I need the player to go full screen, no window borders and such. This can be accomplished by hitting ctrl+f once the program has started. I want to do this programmatically as I need it to launch into full screen without any human interaction.
My guess is that I need to some how get a handle to the window and then send it an event that looks like the "ctrl+f" keystroke.
If it makes any difference, it looks like flashplayer is a gtk application and I have python with pygtk installed.
UPDATE (the solution I used... thanks to ypnos' answer):
./flashplayer http://example.com/example.swf & sleep 3 && ~/xsendkey -window "Adobe Flash Player 10" Control+F
You can use a dedicated application which sends the keystroke to the window manager, which should then pass it to flash, if the window starts as being the active window on the screen. This is quite error prone, though, due to delays between starting flash and when the window will show up.
For example, your script could do something like this:
flashplayer *.swf
sleep 3 && xsendkey Control+F
The application xsendkey can be found here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/adonovan/hacks/xsendkey.html
Without given a specific window, it will send it to the root window, which is handled by your window manager. You could also try to figure out the Window id first, using xprop or something related to it.
Another option is a Window manager, which is able to remember your settings and automatically apply them. Fluxbos for example provides this feature. You could set fluxbox to make the Window decor-less and stretch it over the whole screen, if flashplayer supports being resized. This is also not-so-nice, as it would probably affect all the flashplayer windows you open ever.
I've actually done this a long time ago, but it wasn't petty. What we did is use the Sawfish window manager and wrote a hook to recognize the flashplayer window, then strip all the decorations and snap it full screen.
This may be possible without using the window manager, by registering for X window creation events from an external application, but I'm not familiar enough with X11 to tell you how that would be done.
Another option would be to write a pygtk application that embedded the standalone flash player inside a gtk.Socket and then resized itself. After a bit of thought, this might be your best bet.
nspluginplayer --fullscreen src=path/to/flashfile.swf
which is from the [http://gwenole.beauchesne.info//en/projects/nspluginwrapper](nspluginwrapper project)
Another option would be to write a pygtk application that embedded the standalone flash player inside a gtk.Socket and then resized itself. After a bit of thought, this might be your best bet.
This is exactly what I did. In addition to that, my player scales flash content via Xcomposite, Xfixes and Cairo. A .deb including python source be found here:
http://www.crutzi.info/crutziplayer
I've done this using openbox using a similar mechanism to the one that bmdhacks mentions. The thing that I did note from this was that the standalone flash player performed considerably worse fullscreen than the same player in a maximised undecorated window. (that, annoyingly is not properly fullscreen because of the menubar). I was wondering about running it with a custom gtk theme to make the menu invisible. That's just a performance issue though. If fullscreen currently works ok, then it's unneccisarily complicated. I was running on an OLPC XO, performance is more of an issue there.
I didn't have much luck with nspluginplayer (too buggy I think).
Ultimately I had the luxury of making the flash that was running so I could simply place code into the flash itself. By a similar token, Since you can embed flash within flash, it should be possible to make a little stub swf that goes fullscreen automatically and contains the target sfw.
You have to use Acton script 3 cmd:
stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN;
See Adobe Action script 3 programming.
But be careful : in full screen, you will lose display performances!
I've got this problem ... more under Linux!!!